The group’s return is more fierce than ever before, with shape-shifting songs that melt between post-punk , metal and spoken verse.

South London has long been the warm, nurturing water in which the impending storms of young bands on the rise have brewed, gathering strength from countless opening sets at Venue MOT, the Amersham Arms, the Windmill, the Queen’s Head. Sometime in 2019, Legss came into being in this environment. Their debut EP, Writhing Comedy, was followed by a sophomore effort, Doomswayers, in 2020.

Legss are a little more polished than the bands that came before them. They’re a little less enthusiastically deranged than fresher acts such as Neuroplacid, Fat Dog, or Morgan Noise, bands who make their hardscrabble truths known loudly. For those bands, no idea is too deranged, too bizarre, too sensitive and shiny-new, to warrant trying out onstage in front of a jubilant and wildly loving local crowd who never fail to appreciate the band’s vulnerability—and therein lies their great power. Legss are a little more careful with their energies, a little milder, despite a penchant for amp-exploding bursts of scuzz-rock. On the surface, they look rather like four lads dreamed up by a team of television writers in search of a physical definition of post-punk, an impression which lasts until they start mucking about with the tempo and shapeshift, briefly, into a metal band.

Fester is the group’s latest EP. The opening track, ‘Motto,’ is a delicate, bittersweet melody that sounds like a selection off a film score. As evidenced in the titles of their previous EPs, Legss are equally prone to wordplay and to heaping aesthetic twists and turns on their listeners… Fester is full of them. The title track kicks off with a muttering vocal, mechanically describing vignettes of a late-night urban odyssey. It’s dour, gumshoe patter that sounds like pages torn from the script of an old noir film, read aloud in the rank disappointment of present-day London by a narrator slowly rousing from heavy sedation.

On ‘The Landlord,’ the singer Ned Green’s voice is drowned a thick haze of distortion, fighting to be heard amidst a deluge of harsh scuzz. There’s an extended pause in the track, a blank space, that leaves the listener wondering if the aux has been disconnected, until the scuzz-rock kicks off again, segueing into a crashing tempo change that sees the band echo a vague semblance of ‘Metal Machine Music’.

Throughout Fester, the scenes shift but the theme remains the same. The band cites “London’s sprawling urban landscape,” as a core inspiration. And that’s some heavy psychogeography, honey; London, a place where you can have anything you want except a place to live or a job that pays you enough to entertain the prospect of a future. Legss provide suitably schizoid tempo shifts for these schizoid new rhythms of life; in this, they are wholly representative of their time.