The Winter Olympics
On 1 October The Winter Olympics release their debut album ‘Profit and Loss’ through Exeter punk label Freakscene Records.
It will be available on vinyl, CD and download; its turbulent creation documented in an accompanying book.
The Winter Olympics are a strange band. They play a homemade brand of dance-punk rock and roll, they have an old-school no-budget arena rock show, and at first glance they look like they ought to be spending Saturday afternoons washing the car and doing DIY.
Instead, they’ve spent the last ten years (TEN YEARS!) trying to put together the perfect DIY pop album. It should’ve taken a week; it should sound like shit; in the face of enormous public indifference they should probably have given up.
But they didn’t. Bit-by-bit, bass player by bass player, recording in bedrooms and beneath pubs, they tried to make something unapologetically enormous. A rock album like people used to make, full of singles and big choruses, an ambitious record giddy with new sounds and ideas.
‘Profit and Loss’ is that album. Ten would-be stadium-shagging sing-alongs full of big guitar hooks, bubbling synths, and quick-witted literate lyrics. Previous singles ‘I Prefer The Early Stuff’ and ‘I Miss The Nineties’ have picked up praise and support from 6 Music, Word Magazine (RIP), John Kennedy and Art Brut, and scored the band surprisingly big radio hits in Slovakia, Luxembourg and Argentina.
Dangerously addictive new single ‘Fags and Girls’ (released 24 September) sets its sights closer to home with an eye-stinging story of an old flame that can’t quite be extinguished.
Full Track Listing
1) Regional Showcase
2) I Prefer The Early Stuff
3) Fags And Girls
4) This is The Fourth Time (I Have Been In Your House)
5) They Launched a Probe
6) Attention All Departments
7) I Miss The Nineties
8) A Prize Every Time
9) Feeling European
10) Heavy Metal Ending
Profit and Loss was produced by Paul (Of Sound) Hollingsworth and mastered by Doug Shearer. The Winter Olympics are: Martin Bowman (guitars), Andrew Wagstaff (singing), Simon Oldham (drums), Neil Mackay (bass) and Agatha Mlynarczyk (keys). Sometimes Pippa Wragg Smith sings as well.