12-Year-Old Wonder-kids Pesky! Smell Like Tween Spirit and Rip The Shit Out of Bands Double Their Age

Pesky! are seven kids from Ulverston, Cumbria, a small market town on the edge of the Lake District, who rip harder than they should for their members age – which amazingly sits between eleven and twelve years old. The band formed while in their school’s music class and since then they’ve been applauded by the Guardian, featured on BBC Breakfast, and been included in our own celebratory run-down of the best music released each month. Not bad then, when you consider most schoolkids use music class to muck around with the “DJ” funtion on a Casio keyboard or to blow harshly into a recorder until someone gets a headache.

The band’s debut single “Keep Me” is “a rare and brilliant glimpse into how pure music can feel when it hasn’t been tainted by the gifts of ennui and self-loathing that puberty brings”. But to talk about Pesky! in terms of age, despite it being an amazing feat, is to do them a disservice. Their youthfullness brings a much needed kick to the arse of shoegaze-pop but the quality of their output thus is deserving of more than their “tween-age band” tagline. Pesky! have merged the youthfulness of Keneckie and the harmonics of Slowdive to create, at least from what we’ve already heard, one of the most exciting things since C86.

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Next up then is the band’s latest single “Unbelieveable”. If we had our own dictionary, it would be filed under “lush”.

Pesky’s debut mini-album Smells Like Tween Spirit is re-released as a physical edition on October 23 via Fierce Panda Records. You can get the digital version here.