On the Rise
congratulations

It comes up naturally in conversation, a matter-of-fact admission of where the outfit landed following a stretch of touring for their debut release, Join Hands. For a band whose music feels colourful, immediate, and pleasantly unruly, it is a strikingly grounded place to begin. It’s a gap between appearance and reality that runs through much of what congratulations do.

From the outside, congratulations are a band easy to read as the opposite of exhaustion. Their music is hook-led, high-energy, built for movement. They feel like a rush of colour and sound. But that perception doesn’t show the whole picture. “The industry is in quite a state at the moment,” says Jamie Chellar, guitarist. “The way people are expected to do things isn’t very sustainable.”

For him, the focus now is preservation rather than speed. “We want longevity in this,” Chellar continues. “I think that has to be a factor in considering what happens going forward.” It’s a refreshingly practical answer in a landscape that often encourages young bands to sprint before they know how to pace themselves. congratulations may trade in chaos and colour, but beneath that sits a clear-eyed desire to still be doing this years from now, finding new ways to evolve rather than burning out for the sake of urgency.

Of course, touring still brought its highs. “It was really fun, I really do cherish that time,” Stanhope says. “But it felt like I had seven cold sores at one point. I was so immunologically fucked.” She laughs as she says it, the humour undercutting but not softening the point. That contrast sits at the centre of congratulations: music that feels physical and immediate, made by ordinary people dealing with very ordinary limits.

They talk openly about loving catchy songs, about writing earworms, about the instinctive reaction that tells them when a hook is working. “All our songs are like pop songs, and then we just throw a hand grenade in and see what happens,” Chellar laughs. It’s a neat summary of their appeal. They write for accessibility, then delight in unsettling it.

Even the ways they describe themselves resist firmness. Stanhope offers “gay alternative funk.” Chellar prefers calling them a pop band. Neither definition feels quite right, which seems to suit them just fine. The refusal to settle into one shape is deliberate. “We’re four idiots that, like – it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t happen. But we keep coming together, don’t we?” jokes Stanhope. “Those band practices just keep rolling round,” Chellar retorts. “We are fairly different, but we bring our different energies together to make this nice cacophony of colour and sound,” he finishes more seriously before breaking: “I think that’s quite a good one. Yeah, that looks good written down.”

There’s an ease with everything this group does. It’s even in how they first came together, through overlapping Brighton and Hove scenes. “We all moved down here for uni, and essentially all played in different bands, so we came together that way,” shares Chellar, after the two banter over whether the part of the beach where they met was Hove or “technically Brighton.”

There is no grand founding myth here, just proximity and quick-friendships, a combo that often produces the most interesting bands. Chellar remembers seeing Stanhope perform in an earlier project. “I remember seeing a picture of her. She was just there on stage, black contact lenses, doing this really heavy thing,” he says. “And now I get balayage,” she adds. “So that was a phase.” Like much of what they do, congratulations seem to have emerged through coincidence and solidified through playfulness. They are serious about making music, less interested in performing seriousness.

Their willingness to bounce off one another, embracing each other’s sonic and aesthetic “phases” as friends as much as bandmates, gives the music its range. Sometimes songs come fully formed from Chellar or bassist Greg Burns, sometimes as fragments built collectively. On Join Hands, there’s even one moment where they wrote together in real time. “We sat in a circle and did ‘This Life’ together,” Stanhope says. “That’s rare as hell.”

More often, though, songs are negotiated into existence. Chellar recalls building “I Feel Severe” from a Queens of the Stone Age-style loop, before it was pulled towards something more electronic, then pushed back towards rock by drummer James Gillingham. Producer Luke Phillips eventually found an in-between none of them had fully intended. “I don’t think either of us would have been able to find that middle ground,” Chellar admits.

That shared middle space feels important. Much of congratulations’ music lives there: between pop and abrasion, instinct and arrangement, individual ideas and group compromise. A similar balancing act runs through their lyrics. Fuzzy-guitar pseudo ballad “Get to Me”  began with what they called a “space love” sound, and from there leant into alien and orbital imagery with “cosmic seas” and auto-tuned alien cameos. Meaning differs between members too: Chellar prefers ambiguity, Stanhope pushes for clearer narratives. “There’s always a happy medium, isn’t there?” she says. Songs end up sitting between those instincts, carrying multiple readings before they ever leave the studio.

Their influences work the same way. 80s pop is the shared thread, perhaps unsurprisingly: Prince, Talking Heads, Madonna, Erasure, Vince Clarke, but even that overlap is partial. “You’ve got a four-way Venn diagram,” says Stanhope. “And in the middle is Keane.” “And Muse,” Chellar adds. You can hear it in their music. Glossy pop with something grubbier underneath. “There were just some weird, dark sounds in those really big songs,” Chellar says. “They sound really spooky, but they’re so hooky.”

On stage, that inspiration becomes physical. A past review called them “punk Power Rangers”, a reference to earlier matching outfits they’ve since abandoned. “We found them restrictive both physically and metaphorically,” Stanhope says. Even their exploration of visual identity eventually ran into thoughts about longevity. Still, gigging with their mix of brightness and noise remains central. “I didn't expect how crazy it would be,” Chellar muses. Audiences often tell them they sound heavier live, they share, feeding back into how they think about their own direction. While taxing, touring for Join Hands ultimately clarified what worked and what didn’t. “We realised ‘Damn, we’re not heavy enough’,” says Stanhope, with clear excitement. “We’ve got a heavier album in us.”

Even their approach to rehearsal reflects how constantly they have been moving. After taking April off, the band are preparing for a run of dates including Focus Wales, The Great Escape, and more festivals, which also means something of a novelty: “We’ve got our first band practice in, like, months,” Chellar laughs. Stanhope explains why with typical bluntness: “People are quite shocked when they’re like, ‘When do you practice?’ We literally play all the time.” For congratulations, the live circuit has effectively become the rehearsal room. Returning to a practice space now feels less like routine maintenance and more like a rare pause to take stock before launching back out again. Much needed, too.

Join Hands may have introduced congratulations, but they already sound like a band impatient for the next version of themselves. With more gigs and festivals ahead, rehearsals restarting, and new writing waiting in the wings, things are beginning to move again. If their debut was proof of spark, whatever comes next could be the moment they turn it into something far harder to put out.