swim school thrash out their vulnerable side on “Anyway”

swim school are an amicable solution to festival-ready music in the early half of 2021. Based out of Scotland, their gritty guitar-centred sound draws a likeness to Wolf Alice and Dream Wife, with their previous offerings being fluent in both alt-rock and bouncy indie-pop.

“Anyway”, however, adds a cerebral weight to their sound as the quartet candidly offer a first-person confessional that explores insecurity and vulnerability. While filled with fuzzy strings, vocalist Alice Johnson drives home the mental health struggles of a generation between semi-spoken verses.

Capturing moments of anxiety - “I feel like running”, “bite your tongue”, “you never notice it anyway” – swim school display their versatility whilst taking ownership of their darker times.

Speaking about the track, Alice Johnson tells Best Fit, “It’s based on that alone feeling of no one caring or noticing that you aren’t yourself. You try to explain what’s going on in your head, but it almost feels pointless as the person you are trying to open up to hasn’t even noticed that you are struggling, so you put on a happy front."

“The music replicates that too - instrumentally it’s an upbeat, happy song but lyrically it’s sad and honest, the music acts like a disguise for the lyrics' true meaning. As mental illness is an invisible illness, it is easy to feel that others don’t care about your mental state when the case may be, they haven’t even noticed."

Describing their debut EP, Johnson continues, “Each track on the EP is based on an event that I’ve experienced in the last year and the effect it had on my own mental state and also the mental state of everyone who was involved. The title making sense of it all is the perfect way to express the common feeling that runs throughout the EP. There’s sad, happy and angry songs, each expressing how it feels to try and understand how you are feeling in hard situations.”