Tough Cookie find beauty in the bruised on aching alt-rock cut “Home Run”

Taken from their new EP Devotion, out now via Gravity Records, “Home Run” captures the skin-close stress of cutting off someone whose wreckage has gone too deep. The quartet deal in a crushing kind of honesty, holding affection and hurt in the same breath without letting either soften the force of the other.

Tough Cookie comprises August Tse (vocals and lyrics), Jess Ayres (guitar), Gavin Sullivan (drums), and Dan Hvorostovsky (bass). Their history stretches back to Leeds, where Tse and Hvorostovsky first met a decade ago, and have been in various projects together ever since. After moving to London, they brought Ayres into the fold, already known to them from Leeds, and Sullivan, whose older brother had previously played in a band with Tse. “And here we are six years later,” they laugh.

“Home Run” opens with reverberating strings and fuzzy electronic textures, before a sparkling guitar line carries the melody forward. “OK Computer and The Bends [by Radiohead] are very crucial to how we approach production and songwriting,” Tse says. “And more recently, there’s definitely been Grace by Jeff Buckley,” Hvorostovsky adds. Those reference points meet in the track’s balance of guitar-driven intensity and a more delicate, exposed emotional core. Beneath its shimmer, there is a tension that never quite settles.

Taking shape during a rare moment when the band were writing together, the songwriting process emerged almost as a group therapy session. “The lyrics kind of fell onto a page and ended up being what it is,” Hvorostovsky explains. There is little distance between the words and the feeling behind them. Tse delivers crystalline honesty and allows unfiltered sensitivity to sit in the open.

Directness also shaped the track’s arrangement; “Home Run” began with a basic groove and a simple chord progression. “We started playing it electric, and then realised the vocals were fighting for space, so we went back to the acoustic,” Tse shares. This shift gave the song room to breathe, before the full band comes crashing back in. “We’re building up some sort of tension that doesn’t really get resolved until you fall into the chorus,” Hvorostovsky says. When that release finally arrives, the pressure gives way to a long-held exhale that is a chorus of surrender.

Capturing that particular balance on record has proved difficult to replicate on stage. “It’s one of those tracks that has such a specific sound recorded, but we’re still trying to get it live,” Ayres says. “The nature of how we practice and play, every time we play it, it changes,” Sullivan adds. “We all grew up playing live music, we’re always really good at bouncing off each other if something changes in the moment.” Tough Cookie value that instinctive exchange over exact reproduction. “We pride ourselves on being able to capture something in the moment live as opposed to being very meticulous.”

This preference for instinct runs through Devotion, which Tse recorded and produced over two weeks in a church basement rehearsal space in East London. Asked to describe the experience, they offer a single word: “claustrophobic”. The room’s conditions seem to have seeped into the recordings. “It’s very dark and smells of damp, so that’s why the record is dark and smells of damp,” Hvorostovsky laughs. The title Devotion takes its name from Patti Smith’s book of the same name; her approach to art and tragedy leaving a clear mark. “Her devotion to her craft informed a lot of decisions with this project, and the way she wrote tragedy in a poetic way was definitely an influence lyrically,” Tse says.

Now that Devotion is out in the world, there is a certain relief in letting it go. “It’s nice when you have created something, and you finally can’t touch it anymore. It doesn’t belong to you anymore; it belongs to everyone else,” Hvorostovsky says. “We’re especially excited about it being the first release we’ve done where there are five cohesive songs, that have all been recorded in the same place and written around the same time,” Sullivan explains.

Devotion is followed by two headline shows in Manchester and London, as well as a run of support dates with Northampton three-piece thistle.