A Broken Chord

Founded by Charlie Hales, his brother Felix (drums), and Tippi Lewis (bass), Oral Habit’s
carry themselves with an impatient, urgent innovation, the kind of “can do” attitude central to the burning DIY spirit.

Taking whatever resources are available, and taking whatever resources are at hand, and
pushing them to their sonic limits, the band’s dextrous fuzz-drenched psychedelic
garage-rock stands as an aural battle with the delicious unreliability of the vintage
technologies at their disposal. Listening to their debut album ‘A Broken Chord’, you can
almost sense the searing heat of amp valves, guitars wailing to within an inch of their
strung-out lives. As he says himself, “if a button’s there, it’s there to be pushed.”.

A self-described “Rainbow of Oral Habit”, A Broken Chord, is also an album where the trio show us almost everything they’re capable of. Suiting a band once described by the
Guardian as “impressively full-on”, it’s an album that wrangles with loose cannons of 60s
freakbeat, Krautrock, punk and psychedelia, often switching up tempos and time-signatures within songs as sprawling and loud as they are delicately succinct.