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Emerging from Copenhagen in a squall of killer riffs and ferocious punk energy, Danish three-piece Baby In Vain are set to release one of 2017’s most exciting guitar albums. They are singer-songwriter-guitarists Lola Hammerich and Andrea Thuesen Joahansen and drummer Benedicte Pierleoni.

All three are still in their early 20s, but if their debut record sounds like the work of seasoned pros that’s because it is. They started jamming together 10 years ago, and have since honed their sound by playing countless frenetic live shows. They were hand-picked by The Kills’ Alison Mosshart to join her band on tour, and were praised by Thurston Moore while supporting Chelsea Light Moving. Having built such a fearsome live reputation, their next challenge was to capture their sound in the studio. “Sometimes I think we kind of did it backwards,” observes Andrea. “We were a live band first and we had to learn how to play our songs in the studio in order to record them.”

To do that, the band decamped from Copenhagen to the suburban town of Bredbury, near Stockport in Greater Manchester. There they took up residence in Eve Studios along with longtime PJ Harvey collaborator and producer Rob Ellis. The band found him to be a wise and encouraging influence on their style. “He’d say things like ‘John Peel would like this song’ or ‘Kurt Cobain would have sung it like that’,” remembers Lola. “He made us feel confident and helped us perform the best we could. It felt like we had something to live up to.”

The album is full of incendiary heavy rock songs packed with riffs, as on breakneck, opening track ‘To Heaven And Back’, which sounds like Queens of the Stone Age moshing with The Distillers. On 'More Nothing,' a battle between darkness and light plays out. “When they hear the album, I want people to feel that they are being punched in their gut by rock music,” says drummer Benedicte.

Listening to ‘More Nothing’, it’s clear they’ve succeeded. From the raw materials of the painful, weird and incomprehensible, Baby In Vain have made a heavyweight gut-punch of a record. It will definitely make your days better. It might just change your life.