On the surface, Bristol three-piece Mould present as a new band: a rapidly-rising name on the UK alternative circuit who, in just two EPs – 2024’s self-titled debut offering and 2025’s ‘Almost Feels Like Purpose’ – have already racked up support from the likes of So Young, DIY and Dork, received extensive plays across BBC 6 Music including a recent playlisting for antsy earworm ‘Float’, and made their live debut in cities from Europe to New York.
But bubbling underneath the impressive inroads that the band – formed of vocalist and guitarist Joe Sherrin, vocalist and bassist Kane Eagle, and drummer James Luxton – have made within their current guise sits a long and storied history of playing, writing and gigging together for a full decade. Mould – despite their name – might be fresh, but their eclectically-interwoven, exploratory music comes from years of learning exactly how they tick as a trio. And now, with debut LP ‘Hoping as a Coping Mechanism’, Joe, Kane and James have crafted a record filled with the idiosyncrasies that can only come from having spent time creating a strange, symbiotic musical world to play within.
“We’ve all played in each others’ previous bands, spent time crammed into a tour van for months and we hang out all the time outside of that anyway, so that closeness definitely helps,” Joe says. “We’re all the same person, basically,” Kane shrugs as James laughs: “Same brain, baby!”
The seeds of Mould, in fact, came as a direct response to one of these previous ventures. Heavily involved in the interconnected Bristol scene that featured lynchpin label Breakfast Records and venues such as The White Rabbit and the sadly now-defunct Roll For The Soul where James would put on his own gigs, the trio had been dipping in and out of each others’ projects for a long time. However when they were all enlisted as the backing band for folk singer Fenne Lily, the three musicians found themselves with the urge to then create something directly opposite. “We’d soundcheck a bit and then we’d start just making horrible little rackets and it was brilliant,” recalls Kane. “Off the back of that, we decided that we wanted to do a big, noisy band together.”
Oftentimes Mould are big and noisy – on propulsive, almost mathy previous single ‘FRANCES’, or the motorik rhythms of early track ‘Birdsong’ (which began life during those first soundchecks). But there are also pop sensibilities and a knack for hooks that run rife throughout; the product, Mould explain, of all their previous endeavours coalescing into one supercharged, hybrid whole. “If you know all of our projects, it feels like a blend of all those things,” Joe suggests. “I have a band called Milo’s Planes which is more of a screaming, post-hardcore thing. And me and Kane have got a poppier project called Jumbo. James had a band called Cagework which is somewhere in between, so it’s about finding a nice mix of being poppy and catchy but with a bit of weirdness and heaviness as well.”
Written in snatches of time in hometown Bristol, recorded in London’s 5dB Studios and produced by Sean Oakley (Georgia, Scaler, Sorry), who flew in from LA especially for the project, ‘Hoping as a Coping Mechanism’ is the strongest display of their talents yet. In their own words, it’s “more focussed, paced and thought-out”, but over 13 tracks that explore the horrors of the outside world and the internal minefield of the brain, Mould’s debut also hits with the thrills of a brilliant live band who’ve distilled that energy to tape.
The title comes from a line taken from the time signature-warping ‘Emotive Language’ that distills what it means to be a band in 2026 down to one concise sentiment. “This has always been the dream, playing with your mates and making good songs and getting to tour and make records,” says Kane. “But the realities of trying to start a band now, when you’re 30 and also have other goals at the same time are hard. We’d be doing it regardless, but you have to learn a lot.”
This duality runs throughout the record, where tracks like lead single ‘Float’ speak of “strolling through hellscapes” of social media yet surround their frustrations with the sort of barbed, visceral musicality that sounds like if Interpol had grown up in gloomy, rain-soaked Britain. “You’re endlessly doom scrolling, past a funny video of a sausage, and then there’s Farage and then there’s an ad for something,” Joe says of the track. “That mindnumbing flashy distraction turns you into idiots.”
‘Falling Posture’ begins with a cacophonous blast of noise before turning into a rattling punk number that started life “sounding a bit like The Cribs”, and then drops out into an unexpected slacker final third. Like many of Mould’s wares, they call it a “Frankenstein song” – one made of seemingly disparate ingredients bolted together into one exciting and surprising whole. The same goes for ‘Hatching’: “We like it when a song is a bit more riffy or mathy and then it builds up to a really simple, straight poppy chorus,” says Joe. “It’s a tension builder. We like jumping around the page and not staying in one place.”
Elsewhere, ‘Lists’ underpins a gloriously anthemic, fists aloft chorus with a curious little electronic motif that twinkles underneath as its lyrics paint surreal yet specific pictures amongst it all (“Meet me at the unobtainable end of a roll of a tape / With nothing to stick…”). ‘Lucid’ leans into punchy, grizzled riffs and some of the album’s heaviest yet catchiest moments, while ‘Humm’ ends the record with the melancholy grandiosity of orchestral strings.
A debut packed with ideas, and realised by a trio with the experience and super-solid foundations to execute them, ‘Hoping as a Coping Mechanism’ is as strong an advert as any for the importance of creating brilliant things with your mates, no matter what adversity surrounds you. In Mould, there’s a hell of a lot of hope to be found.
