Featured image: Alan Brown
The cosy confines of YES’s first floor is heaving. Rich strobes of ruby red and cobalt blue spotlight the stage that Lime Garden will soon grace for a sold-out show, the first night of a nine-date tour across the UK & Ireland. The anticipatory chatter rises with every passing minute until finally, the room floods with pink and the four-piece take to the Pink Room’s platform.
‘Bitter’ begins the night’s proceedings, accompanied by a sea of heads nodding in time to its rhythm, the sonority of the live rendition even more impressive than its recorded counterpart. Lead vocalist and guitarist, Chloe Howard, addresses the room after ‘Pop Star’, the first feature of the evening from debut album, One More Thing. “Thanks for coming… on a Tuesday night as well!”
They devote a large portion of the setlist to showcasing their new record, a well-considered mix of bright indie-rock and melancholy “sad songs”. Its offerings inspire a continuous kineticism within the crowd, who respond innately to each change in tempo and texture.
Bodies sway in tandem with the soft and breezy sound of ‘Pine’, while pastel peaches and yellows softly bathe the band during ‘It’. Both demonstrate an element of poeticism in their lyrics, the delivery of which have an air of enchantment attached. Meanwhile the heat of the more up-tempo ‘Nepotism (Baby)’ frenetically energises the room’s molecular structure.
“I’m not Charli XCX so bear with me”, Howard declares, before delivering ‘Floor’ alongside Leila Deeley (guitar), Tippi Morgan (bass) and Annabel Whittle (drums). It is drenched in auto-tuned hyper-pop vocals, with rushing percussion and plucky strings making it difficult not to dance.
Other influences are also apparent; there’s a Foals-esque quality to Morgan’s masterful bass lines in ‘Love Song’ and ‘Sick & Tired’, while guitar riffs in ‘I Want To Be You’ and ‘Pop Star’ evoke The Strokes. What’s impressive, however, is how Lime Garden take these gems of inspiration and project them through a distinct lens of their own making.
It’s been a marathon, not a sprint, in the band’s journey to releasing a debut album. From first releasing music in 2020 and gigging their way through the small-venue scene, they have crafted both a compelling sound and a robust live presence. Following their tour on home soil, the band are set to cross the pond for their first run of shows in America and their growth doesn’t appear to be slowing; the future is undoubtedly fruitful for this Brighton-based band.
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