FEATURE: Spotlight: Any Young Mechanic

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Any Young Mechanic

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EVEN though there are not…

many interviews online with the great Any Young Mechanic, I did want to spotlight them here. However, as they recently played the NME Stage at The Great Escape, they were highlighted. A band that you need to know about. In this NME feature, we get to know more about this incredible Australian band:

“Conceived in Adelaide’s intimate DIY scene, the group’s barnstorming, life-affirming folk demands to be seen live. The acoustic guitar, banjo and violin are their killer weapons, cut from the same cloth as Sports Team’s sarcastic pub-rock or “Black Country, New Road playing early Fleet Foxes songs”, in the words of drummer Jay Eliot Mee. The band world of south London that spawned BC, NR leaves a telling influence on the five-piece, who emphasise immediacy and imperfection more than committing to any particular sound.

‘There’s A New Place On The Market’ transforms a haunted house into a folk fairytale, while the playful high-tempo of ‘My House Divides’ is a certified bouncer, as meandering vocalist Sam Wilson babbles about pinot grigio and dog groomers. Both songs are taken from June’s incoming debut album ‘The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot’, a title that sums up the vivid lyrical anecdotes scattered throughout. Now, they sail into Brighton on the back of latest single ‘Captain and Compass’, a hearty folk anthem readymade for the seaside.

“We are always trying to make music that confronts the world of today, and for us, that means emphasising liveness and the human quality of our music,” adds Mee. That’s a message we can get on board with and one you can receive straight from the horse’s mouth at the NME Stage”.

You need to follow Any Young Mechanic. This article provides a little more depth about this tremendous quintet. I am new to their work, so I am sort of playing catch up. After playing in the U.K., thewy have caught the eye of many who were unaware of them previously. I do hope that they come and play here more in the future:

“The band consists of Sam Wilson (vocals), Jachin Mee (drums, backing vocals), Thea Martin (violin and multi-instrumentalist), Allan McBean (double bass) and Luka Kilgariff-Johnson (guitar, banjo). They met while studying at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide, where they honed their musicianship and developed a shared curiosity for exploring sound beyond traditional boundaries. Influenced by Adelaide’s close-knit DIY scene as well as the new wave of British alternative music, Any Young Mechanic do not simply replicate folk traditions — they reinterpret them for the present day.

Their debut album, “The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot”, was recorded in an almost documentary fashion, with the band playing together live in the studio, without edits or heavy production interventions. The result is a record marked by organic cohesion and immediacy, while the songs retain breadth, dynamic range and strong narrative depth. It is contemporary folk that feels both fresh and timeless”.

On 5th June, The Modern Show Is Ruining the Foot is out. I would urge everyone to check out the album. You can tell that Any Young Mechanic are going to be around for a very long time. Their songwriting so fresh and affecting. How you listen to their songs and you can instantly tell it is them. Lines and moments that stay with you for hours.

Bringing raw and imperfect human moments back to the Folk scene, Atwood Magazine talked with Any Young Mechanic in April. I do hope that everyone connects with this exciting band. One that I would like to see play live soon. There are a couple of other U.K. dates coming from the band. They play The Shacklewell Arma on 31st May before playing at the Elephant’s Head on 2nd June. Their upcoming album is going to be extraordinary: “Frontman Sam Wilson describes the record as an attempt to move beyond folk’s more predictable tendencies. “We are trying to make folk music for now,” he says. “Turning it on its head in a new, sometimes uncanny way, because we don't want to just do the old thing again”:

“This push and pull – between openness and obstruction, intimacy and distance – sits at the heart of “There’s a New Place on the Market.” The refrain circles back with a pleading insistence: “What have you got to hide / I only want to know you well,” a line that reads as both personal and political, aimed as much at another person as it is at the systems that shape the world around them. And yet, for all its lyrical weight, the band never lose sight of movement – the song “staggers onwards,” as they describe it, carried by a steady pulse that keeps it from collapsing under its own gravity. It’s this balance – live musicianship, emotional clarity, and a willingness to let imperfections breathe – that makes the track feel so fully alive, capturing the essence of a band that thrives in the space between control and release.

In candid conversation, vocalist and guitarist Sam Wilson admits that it’s been three long years since he first wrote this song, as well as much of the band’s record. “I know that I’d been listening to a lot of Pavement around the time of writing, and that it’s very hard to live in Adelaide without thinking about the con of the real estate market in some way,” he reflects.

The same raw immediacy, the same fascination with space, identity, and modern dislocation runs through the band’s growing catalog, each song adding new contours to the world they’re building. “Snug Barber” arrived first in a burst of wiry, off-kilter energy, its jagged imagery and uncanny phrasing (“Your bin bag is filled with razors / Rusted, snapped or blunt”) introducing a band unafraid to embrace mess, humor, and emotional contradiction all at once. It’s playful on the surface, but there’s a deep tenderness tucked inside its chaos – a belief, repeated like a mantra, that even in disarray, “you’re cut out for love.”

That emotional thread stretches and shifts across the subsequent singles. The feverish “My House Divides” leans into a more urgent space as violins sear and soar throughout, its lyrics tracing intimacy through shared domestic imagery before fracturing into multiplicity – “When my house divides… yours multiplies” – a line that feels both surreal and softly crushing, hinting at how connection can splinter just as easily as it forms.

Meanwhile, desire, disillusionment, and absurdity collide head-on in the dreamy “Pretty Strange World”: “I want a chest packed with loot… I want more than you,” Sam Wilson sings, before pulling back to question the very systems feeding that hunger – “what you’re selling me seems much too cheap.” Across these songs, Any Young Mechanic hone their perspective with each step, expanding their palette while holding tight to the same core impulse: To examine the structures we live inside – homes, markets, relationships, expectations – and expose the fragile, human truths hiding underneath.

“We love to play live. We love to play in the room. We love to make mistakes and listen back and see how they punctuate our recordings,” Luka Kilgariff-Johnson asserts. “This record has no overdubs, no stitched takes, what you hear is what was played, flubs and all. I think the record encapsulates the spirit of our approach to making music as a collective, and is a pretty honest document of how we sound, whether that be live, in-studio or otherwise.”

Zooming out, The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot reads like a document of process as much as it does a debut – a record shaped by proximity, trust, and the friction that comes from five people learning how to move as one. These songs don’t chase perfection; they preserve it in motion, holding onto the cracks, the hesitations, the fleeting moments where instinct takes over and the music breathes on its own. Across its growing preview, the album reveals itself as a study in modern discomfort – how we live, what we inherit, and the quiet negotiations we make with the systems surrounding us – all filtered through a band intent on keeping the human element front and center.

That intention runs deeper than aesthetic. As Sam Wilson shares, “The album is important to me as an attempt to explore the ways in which I feel uncomfortable with aspects of modernity. I tried to explore that discomfort without the cliche of turning towards conservatism. How do you express your discomfort with technology as a progressive? We’re in an unusual time where a good chunk of technology represents harmful desires from a few powerful people. For a long time (especially in music), technological advancement and artistic progress were ubiquitous. Now I’m not so sure.”

Every note feels inhabited, every line delivered with the weight of five people listening to one another in real time, responding, adjusting, trusting the moment enough to let it unfold as it is. There’s a rare kind of closeness at the heart of these songs – a warmth that doesn’t smooth over the rough edges, but embraces them, letting the frayed threads show. That rawness isn’t incidental; it’s the point. It’s what gives their music its pulse.

In a landscape increasingly shaped by precision and polish, The Modern Shoe Is Ruining The Foot stands as a reminder of what can happen when artists choose presence over perfection. These songs breathe. They stretch. They leave room for error, for instinct, for the fleeting magic that only exists when people are truly in sync with one another. And in doing so, Any Young Mechanic offer more than a debut – they offer a feeling: that music, at its core, is still a shared, human act.

That sense of presence – of five people meeting each moment as it comes – runs through every corner of Any Young Mechanic’s music, grounding even their most abstract ideas in something deeply felt and unmistakably human. It’s what makes their songs linger, not just as compositions, but as lived experiences captured in real time”.

This is a big moment for Any Young Mechanic. Their debut album is out on 5th June. I feel that The Modern Shoe Is Ruining the Foot will be among this year’s best debuts. A magnificent offering from a group that you have to listen to. The minute that you hear their phenomenal music, when you finishing hearing their songs, they will remain long…