At the tail end of last year Glasgow’s Humour put out their debut EP Pure Misery, a six-track fever dream that established the band as one of the most exciting new bands on the circuit, a record they called themselves “a montage of miserable things… a bit desperate and a bit grim, but also a bit ridiculous”.

Today they follow it with a further sonic leap in the form of the propulsive live favourite “Wrangel”, a song mapping out a narrative set upon the isolated Wrangel Island.

“‘Wrangel’ is inspired by different stories of polar exploration. I was reading the biography of Captain Robert Scott who led an expedition of five men to be the first to reach the South Pole, all of whom died on the return journey in an unrelenting blizzard. The music had come together already, and the plodding, steady rhythm of the verses made me think of trudging through snow. I had recently watched an episode of Our Planet which showed footage of Wrangel Island in the arctic circle, an uninhabited place where polar bears are now arriving in their thousands to hunt because of the lack of sea ice. I thought that there could be something peaceful about being in a place like that, and wanted the character in the song to be imagining living his life out on Wrangel as he makes his way across the ice without much hope of survival.

An Indigenous Alaskan woman called Ada Blackjack actually did this after being sent to Wrangel as part of a doomed expedition of which she was the sole survivor, living alone on the island for nearly two years while teaching herself to hunt and to fend off the polar bears which she had a mortal fear of. A really incredible person. These stories of both survival and accepting fate at the end of the world were the inspiration for the song.”

Upcoming Humour Tour Dates
dd/mm

26/08 Connect Festival, Edinburgh, UK
17/09 Leffingeleuren Festibal, Leffinge, BE
18/09 Witloof, Brussels, BE
23/09 Floatalong Festival, Sheffield, UK

w/ Do Nothing:

24/09 Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, UK
25/09 King Tuts, Glasgow, UK
26/09 Cluny, Newcastle, UK
28/09 Brudenell, Leeds, UK
29/09 Gorilla, Manchester, UK
30/09 Rock City, Nottingham, UK
02/10 Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, UK
04/10 Thekla, Bristol, UK
05/10 The Castle & Falcon, Birmingham, UK
06/10 Koko, London, UK
07/10 Patterns, Brighton, UK
13/10 Privatclub, Berlin, GE
14/10 Loppen, Copenhagen, DE
19/10 Point Ephemere, Paris, FR
20/10 Le Grand Mix, Tourcoing, FR

Stream “Wrangel” HERE.