It’s been a while since we heard from Finnish Indie outfit Giant Giant, one of my favourite ‘small’ bands from that country since we started NMR 6 years ago this week. In fact it was way back in 2016 when they released their self titled debut album, which found it’s way on to our NMR ‘Albums of the Year’ list thanks to guitar driven tracks such as ‘All You Need is More’ and ‘Summer in the Shade’.
We did briefly catch up with one of the project members J. Ihminen a couple of years back when he released a nice Finnish language track entitled ‘Hetken’, but we left him sitting in a field full of sunflowers with his guitar and we’ve heard nothing from any of them since
Thankfully the full trio have been back recording new material and the 1st new release is a single entitled ‘Sidetrack’. From the synth and piano opening I even thought they be softening their style slightly, but it doesn’t take long for the normal blaze of guitars to be introduced, and the high flowing pace of that instrumental support is still very typically Giant Giant, as are those low key vocals, which are not always possible to decipher lyrically, but still carry a decent tune – and despite the complexity of the noise around it.
It’s good to have them back, and I do like indie bands that rattle out high energy tracks with a cacophony of guitars and melodic vocals. I have no idea how far they’ve got with that follow up album, but they’ll certainly get plenty of encouragement from our direction.