Wild Beasts

Track	Album
The Devil’s Crayon	Limbo Panto
All The King’s Men	Two Dancers
Hooting & Howling	Two Dancers
Two Dancers (i)	Two Dancers
Lion’s Share	Smother
End Come Too Soon	Smother
Plaything	Smother
Wanderlust	Present Tense
Mecca	Present Tense
Dreamliner	Boy King

Embed from Getty Images

l-r Chris Talbot, Hayden Thorpe, Tom Fleming, Ben Little – photo Wendy Lynch (2016)

The independent music of the first half of the millennium’s first decade in many ways evinced a retread of previous eras, with the classic four-person band format enduring in the main and, in the UK at least, Britpop and New Wave providing the dominant templates.

Wild Beasts emerged in those years as a youthful counterpoint to prevailing mores. The band were formed in Kendal, on the edge of the Lake District – before eventually moving to Leeds, always a city with a robust musical culture but one that would flourish in subsequent years and right up until the present day.

The group arrived at a time when UK guitar music had hit something of a brick wall. The posthumously labelled ‘indie sleaze’ movement of the early 2000s had begun to look a lot less impressive than it seemed at the time with bands such as Razorlight and the Libertines dissolving spectacularly and American acts gathering all the critical laurels. From the National to Sufjan Stevens; from Animal Collective to LCD Soundsystem, the quality on show quickly supplanted most UK comers – indeed, I have written before at these pages of James Murphy’s genre bending innovations with the last named of these.

Gallingly, the whole gamut of UK guitar acts came to be bestowed with the disdainful label of ‘landfill indie’ – a moniker that would come to stick like glue. To their credit, the likes of the Kooks and Pigeon Detectives didn’t let it stop them selling lots of gig tickets.

Like Suede a decade and a half before, Wild Beasts eschewed the lumpen, knuckle dragging tendencies of the most notorious of their contemporaries, aiming for a sound which, while indolently labelled ‘art school’ or ‘art pop’ in the press, really did draw on other forms such as literature and drama as much as it did pure music. Indeed, first album Limbo Panto could not have been more explicitly theatrical in its outlook. Vaudevillian in tone, its textures owed more to Gilbert and Sullivan and the Victorian music hall (Thorpe rounds off the LP with the refrain “Cheerio Chaps; Cheerio, Goodbye”), replete with jarring key shifts and sudden changes of pace, interrupting a general jauntiness that faintly recalled Cardiacs or Fiery Furnaces. The whole was crowned by the unworldly yelping and shrieking of chief vocalist Hayden Thorpe, whose untamed falsetto reminded one of the Associates’ Billy Mackenzie but was a singular new voice if ever there was one. Thorpe shared singing duties with bandmate Tom Fleming, the latter’s lush baritone providing the perfect contrast to the former’s high pitch.

In truth, this first full-length outing, while unquestionably bringing something new to the table, was often a difficult listen and a self-consciously uncommercial one. That is, save for The Devil’s Crayon, the first of this selection of ten tracks. Fleming’s involvement is crucial as the track proceeds, a classic yin and yang combination set against the backcloth of clattering percussion.

Personally, I came to Limbo Panto retrospectively in 2009 after a great friend recommended Wild Beasts on the back of second album Two Dancers and in particular, All The King’s Men, a song that truly deserves its status alongside indie disco staples such as Love Will Tear Us Apart, Common People, Trashand This Charming Man. Uncontrollably catchy, Thorpe and Fleming again vocalise in perfect tandem with Thorpe veritably whooping the chorus and Fleming serenading of girls from the seemingly random quarters of Roedean, Shipley, Hounslow and Whitby – I mean, Hounslow?

Elsewhere on this second long-form record, appeared Hooting & Howling, possessing much of the band’s dramatic impulse and almost standing as a manifesto for Thorpe’s vocal style – for hoot and howl he most certainly does. Although the showiness of Limbo Panto was still there, it was clear from the first bars of opener, The Fun Powder Plot that Two Dancers was a more restrained body of work, but nonetheless a confident one to place alongside Suede’s Coming Up, an olive branch to a more commercially inclined listenership but without dialling down the innovation.

By now, Wild Beasts’ determination to explore themes of sexuality and androgyny were front and centre, an association with the ‘mis-shapes’ of the Pulp song from the 1990s, a pride in being different from the norm and not be scared to be flamboyant or to stand out at the risk of being persecuted or harmed. A further track from the album is the fourth song on my list – Two Dancers (i) sees Fleming opine deeply of being dragged through the street by one’s ankles and enquiring whether an un-named interlocutor wants his bones between their teeth.

If Two Dancers moved Wild Beasts in a quieter, more reflective direction, third LP Smother, released in 2011, is very much a mellow, mood piece that makes most sense seen as a totality and from which it is perhaps difficult to pick out individual tracks from what is a gorgeous whole. That said, the album commences with the unforgettable Lion’s Share where Thorpe conjures up a by turns caring and defiant carnality by drawing comparisons with the big cat of the title. Again, his falsetto interacts wonderfully with the stentorian tones of his co-vocalist. Fast forward to the summer of 2025 and in a performance largely devoted to his latest solo album, Ness, I was lucky enough to see Thorpe provide a breathtaking solo rendition of the track at Totnes’ superb Barrel House venue, using the song’s signature instrument, the piano, to beautiful effect.

In an interview with The Quietus, Thorpe had joked that it took ages for people to get rowdy at Wild Beasts’ gigs, so he gave up, perhaps signalling a reason for Smother’s greater level of introspection. Elegiac closing track End Come Too Soon provides ample evidence of that over the course of its seven and a half minutes. “On the cusp, the both of us, without any maybes but musts, that carry us, to the end too soon” sings Thorpe as the song descends into a quiet drone of a middle eight before building momentum again amid a haze of stately percussion.

Elsewhere, on Plaything, Chris Talbot’s textbook rattling drum sound led into another exploration of dark sexuality from Thorpe – “Take off your chemise and I’ll do, as I please” he crooned. I probably prefer other tracks but the song perhaps sums up Wild Beasts’ modus operandi as well as any tune they produced.

It’s rare indeed to be blown away by a track on first listen at a live gig but that’s what happened to me at Oxford’s O2 Academy in 2013. Fourth album, Present Tense, allowed for greater use of keyboards, with all the band members involved in this process. The opening synthesized rumble of the track in question, also the LP’s opener, Wanderlust, struck home immediately and the central plea – “Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck” is a line to place alongside some of the great putdowns in music.

Mecca is my partner’s favourite Wild Beasts’ track, starting with one of the combo’s most memorable lines, “All we want is to feel that feeling again” – the song’s graceful restraint recalls many nights driving on the M1 and other thoroughfares in a period where I had entered into a still new long-distance relationship. Thorpe tells of moving in “fear and desire”, one of his most resonant choruses.

Wild Beasts’ final album, Boy King, was less well received; its raunchy masculinity, albeit still of the ambiguous kind, brought to mind Steve Lamacq’s comment that bands tend to lose it once they resort to wearing leather trousers. That said, the final track on the LP, Dreamliner sees the band sign off in subdued but intimate fashion, a perfect ballad that is accompanied by a hushed, sampled choir.

The band split after Boy King and both Thorpe and Fleming have gone on to plot impressive solo careers. The former in particular has explored more artistic directions – the aforementioned Ness came out in 2024 and as well as in Totnes, I saw him perform tracks from the LP with elegance and real charm at Exeter’s tiny Bookbag bookshop that year. Wild Beasts are a band to cherish amid the hubbub and shoutiness of the past two decades of independent music.