(Credits: Far Out / Jacob Ray)
Sun 31 August 2025 8:00, UK
I don’t want to blow your mind or anything, but life is intensely fucking scary right now, wherever you may lay your head. If you disagree with that statement, you are almost certainly part of the problem.
There are a myriad of things I can point to in order to prove this statement true, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t want to insult your intelligence. If you’re going out of your way to read about the music of Legss, then you almost certainly know what’s going on about right now, because Legss make post-punk music that matches every terrifying beat of it.
The music that most matches the times isn’t often the most popular music of the day. Sure, there are times when they chime. Just look at ‘Born in the USA’ and its twisted anti-patriotism being one of the biggest songs of the year that Ronald Reagan swept to re-election in a historic landslide victory. Most of the time, though, the charts aren’t the place to see music that genuinely matches the spirit of the time. After all, music that hits the big time often isn’t made by people who actually live in those times the way that we do.
No, you’ve got to look at the grassroots. Legss join a pantheon that began with The Velvet Underground and The Stooges, capturing the societal chaos of the late 1960s better than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones ever could. The Slits made genuinely, uncomfortably angry music when punk was being bastardised by Malcolm McLaren, trying to turn Sex Pistols demos into hit singles. The Dead Kennedys in the 1980s, PJ Harvey in the 1990s, Boy In Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal in the 2000s: all acts and albums that achieved icon status by being the uncompromising sound of the times.
That’s a legacy that Legss are trying to join with their intense, discordant post-punk. The kind that, like the world it reflects, sounds on the brink of collapse every time you check in, yet somehow keeps going. One wonders what you’re going to discover as time goes on, appalled but unable to look away. This is thanks to vocalist and guitarist Ned Green’s foreboding, almost threatening sprechgesang monologues that carry more than a hint of a cut-glass Mark E Smith.
Why are Legss building such momentum at the moment?
It should come as no surprise to anyone that Legss are the product of the thriving South London post-punk scene. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Brixton Windmill and its surrounding rock scene will be familiar with bands of this ilk. The likes of Black Midi and Black Country, New Road have become big-name cult acts off the back of that scene, yet Legss offer something different and a lot darker. If anything, they’re more akin to another post-punk horror show that crawled from south of the river over a decade ago.
If there’s one band that Legss actually harken back to, it’s the Fat White Family. They lurched out of Peckham with two things setting them apart from the pack. Firstly, their mutated, Birthday Party-indebted garage rock sound, and secondly, their genuine desire to shock and appal. Nothing about them was palatable. From the name down, everything about them was tailor-made to throw modern culture back at the listener in the most uncomfortable, grimace-inducing way.
Legss might not be as grotesque as The Family, but they’re just as uncompromising, to the extent that they wrote a whole song called ‘Letter To Huw’, depicting the BBC’s Huw Stephens as a shadowy music industry grifter who can’t stand music anymore. The band swears blind that it’s not based on any real-life interaction with the DJ himself and was instead “drawn from a few revealing conversations with radio producers and industry types”, according to an interview with Loud and Quiet; it’s still not the kind of thing any careerist would do.
Which is the horrible truth of modern music at the moment. All the barriers put up to making music mean that the only people involved in music, especially music as outdated as rock ‘n’ roll, are split into one of two groups. Careerist hacks who would slit their dog’s throat for a prime slot on a Spotify playlist, and those who really mean it. Three guesses where Legss sit on that spectrum. Here’s hoping for great things out of them.
Related Topics
The Far Out Post-Punk Newsletter
All the latest Post-Punk content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.