Hotel Lux reveal the "sound" of Christmas to help Shelter

Iconic menswear brand Basic Rights - launched in 2016, by guitarist Freddie Cowan of The Vaccines, to provide the ideal uniform for modern creatives – partnered with homelessness charity shelter to set the challenge. Christmas songs have a special, indefinable magic, and we can all tell them when we hear them. But what is it exactly that makes a Christmas song sound Christmassy? What exactly is ‘the sound of Christmas’?

Rising London band Hotel Lux - not exactly known for their Christmassy sound – decamped to London's legendary RAK studios where they spent the day making their own iconic contribution to the world of Christmas songs: "The Carvery".

"Having spent a lot of my life in the studio, I know how hard it is to come up with something in a day, let alone a full song," says Cowan. "But the guys went for it, and The Carvery answers the question of what makes a Christmas song sound like Christmas."

See their film of the band working out the Christmas sound in the studio, and recording the song with Ben Baptie, one of the best British engineers working today, who mixed the latest album by The Strokes.

The Carvery is available as a digital download on Hotel Lux’s Bandcamp, and will be on Spotify from 19 December. All proceeds go to Shelter, supporting Basic Rights' Christmas campaign where 100% of all sales of their best-selling white T-Shirt are donated to Shelter.

"We wanted to appeal to that Christmas nostalgia, a bit of Slade, a bit of The Pogues," Hotel Lux explain. Watch the video for "The Carvery" below.