This summer marks one year further away from 2020 which means it’s a year where we are living our best lives even bester. Glasgow-based DIY punkers, Current Affairs, not only have our new favourite anthem for blowing out the cobwebs but even a new Pride anthem to boot,

The four piece drop the new album, Off The Tongue, on 14th July via Tough Love Records with ‘The Right Time’ and ‘Her Own Private Multiverse’ being our instant faves FYI. But the whole album is packed with snarly vocals, punchy lyrics and moments of the brightest pop. See the video for next single, ‘Reactor’, below.

While the band all write songs as a collective, singer Joan Sweeney has been in the group since the beginning, holding it together. Loverboy catches up with Joan to discuss writing the new album, her own Queer icons and Kim Wilde.

Hi Joan, where are you answering our questions from? What can you see? Paint us a picture…
Right now we’ve just had a thunderstorm for which I’m very grateful. Glasgow’s gotten too hot for me in the summer… The birds are chirping about in the big old trees along the street and I’m looking across the tenement rooftops that are still gushing water from their gutters. I’m sitting on my bed with my cat Wren who’s going between snoozing and searching for birds with her eyes. – she’s a beautiful torbie with shaggy hair and a bow tie with socks. From my bed, I can see my dressing table with all my perfumes lined up (I’ve become a massive scent head) and my trinkets laying around half-purposefully, like a bark ring I found with my dad on Raasay island, a picture of me and my brother sitting on Love-a-Lot the Care Bear’s lap, little rocks, gems and pieces from other places.

Congratulations on the new album. You’ve been away a couple of years – how does it feel to return?
Thank you! It feels like I’ve put my skin back on. I never feel more myself than when I’m playing music with people, but especially Current Affairs cos I consider them some of my closest friends, they make me giddy. It’s so nice to be playing shows because, aside from being fun, it’s really helped to shake off the dead weight of the last few years.

Was there a specific moment/event that made you want to get back to Current Affairs or was it just a natural post-Covid/lockdown journey?
We weren’t truly away, although to all intensive purposes I suppose we kind of were. Gemma joined the band and played one show with us and wrote one song before Covid hit, which is lucky in a way that we got to at least make our intentions known. Ymai moved to Berlin during Covid too which created a double barrier to making progress, although he’s so prolific he was still sending us bits of music all the time. I suppose the reason was that we always planned to do this album and Tough Love were very patient with us, so when the dust was beginning to settle we just wanted to make a big push and get it done. I also found Covid so difficult to be creative in. I remember once meeting in the park for Ray Aggs’ (Raggs, Shopping) birthday and everyone kind of went round in a circle saying what they’d been up to and almost every single person had written an album (check out Lady Neptune, Pink Pound, Nightshift) while I learned to macrame. I also think macrame’s kind of disgusting so I don’t know why I did it in the first place. So…I guess I could have answered ‘natural post-Covid lockdown journey’ and that would have got you there quicker, sorry!

What did you find you wanted to say on this album?
Oh, everything meaningful and nothing in particular. Shockingly, I had been a little depressed. The record gave me a place for the trying to work it out of it all where I could get reflective but be supportive of myself and the people around me. There are songs that are about all kinds of love and like a lot, friendship, community and socialism. Singing and writing lyrics is a way for me to get into all the parts of me and really let them speak. Most of all, I wanted to show that there’s a place for all your feelings and that we should sometimes let negative thoughts ring out honestly, then show them a little compassion. It can be important to sit in your feelings, they just need to be focussed right, and that’s something I was really working on personally when we were writing.

It sounds like your writing process is collaborative with the group. Were there any themes that came up in writing that you weren’t expecting?
Very much so. People of course bring ideas, but they’re fleshed out by us all in our practices. This time was a little different in that Ymai would send us some phone recordings with ideas that we then played around with in our houses till we met up, but I guess that gave us more thinking time than usual. Theme-wise, I’m not sure, I suppose it’s always surprising where someone’s thinking from at the same time as you. As in, I might be channeling some Kim Wilde while someone else is thinking about a Killing Joke-y riff and you don’t realise till you stop playing and chat about it, but then you see that the push of the two is coming from a shared attitude that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought of. Ymai and his friend Boitel (who put out a single for us a while ago on his … label) like to play a game of figuring out what I’m singing about which often comes out pretty funny.

The line up of the group has changed and now as well as your Glasgow background, you have a Berlin-based Chilean and two Londoners in the group. Have you felt any broader sounds coming into this album from these other locations or are you all coming from the same sound sonically?
Hmm, I’m not sure to be honest. Ymai and Andrew have been in Current Affairs since we started, but Ymai moving away and Gemma joining has probably had an influence. I think we’ve gotten reinvigorated a little by both those things and have gotten excited to share and talk about music from further afield again perhaps. Sonically we’ve always been a band that comes from almost the same place but not which I think is really important. We share music with each other all the time and it’s often things that maybe come from the slightly different undergrounds we lurk in, but that we nearly always all agree are the best thing we’ve ever heard for a couple of weeks when we hear it. I think that comes out in the music too – there’s an agreement and an excitement that we’re sharing, but it’s not a straightforward sound. I think it’s what makes our admittedly quite retro sound a bit more interesting and fresh.

I think ‘No Fuss’ is such a great opener for the album. My interpretation was commenting on queer dating apps. But I’ve been wrong before! Haha…can you tell me more about the track?
My biggest hope for this record is that people get to make it their own and make it make sense personally, so I love this take! No Fuss was written as a love song with a bit of a maniacal edge: on the verge of being out of control and head over heels, but full of positive energy, gravitating toward something you’re sure will feel good any which way it happens. It’s more about loving the feeling of fancying someone probably than the person themselves and playing out all the routes that could take, being open to it. So…dating apps is a good fit!

And we need to talk about ‘The Right Time’. I feel I definitely aged prematurely during 2020 and this year I am closer to blowing away those cobwebs and..rejuvenating! Seizing the moment. – Tell me more about this song and how it came to be?
Ha, yes me too. Me, and everyone I knew really, were very much in a hole and I think the political climate was also bringing us down. It became so clear how the Left had been fragmented, not just in recent times but really over the last 50 years or so and now that we needed it most, it felt harder to pull together. There were also such positives happening and brewing too though so it was refocusing things a little. When we came to write the song, it started as a song to help someone close to me get out of this sort of double funk – a bit of sympathy but also something to rally to and get out, on and up. When we play it now, it helps me a lot too and creates this energy that makes me feel ready for most anything. I hope other people at least find that from it a little too.

I love ‘Her Own Private Multiverse’. It feels like a Pride Anthem for this month. Can you tell us more about it?
That’s beautiful to me, please make it so! Her Own is one of my favourites on this album and I love playing it, it feels really connecting. We started writing it cos we realised that we hadn’t written a slow one in a while and thought we would give it a go. It was the first song on the album that we got to write fully together in the moment while rehearsing. In terms of the lyrics, this will be an overshare, so move on if it makes you awkward. I had started Internal Family Systems therapy around 2020 and it was totally transformational for me in how I thought of my self and all my ways. It helped in ways that other therapies never really had and gave me a lot of compassion for myself and for other people. Essentially the idea is that you’re made up of lots of parts and they’re all constructed for a reason, usually to protect you in some way, so you let your parts speak and you look at them with curiosity not criticism. There’s a lot more to it than that, but it’s well worth an investigation if anyone’s interested in it. Her Own was trying to describe that and give it to other people a little, that you should respect all the parts of you no matter how shameful you’ve felt towards them in the past and you should have respect for the hard work they’re all doing: let your self shine out otherwise it’s much, much worse. I suppose this is why it can connect for you to Pride and why I’d love it to, it should be a song to feel your worth to.

Speaking of Pride Month, who are your queer icons/role models?
Tricky! I’m sure I’ll want to swap someone in later, but I’ll bite the bullet and go with these. Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn I’ve always been slightly obsessed with. I used to think my two aunts looked like each of them and I would watch them interact imagining it was them when I was young. I like complicated, strong people in general and Crawford is endlessly complex, and I can watch Hepburn interviews for hours. In music, Greg Sage is a role model for me massively, not that I could necessarily do all that he’s done. Wipers are one of my favourite bands, but I also love how he promoted so many amazing bands and women not as cute toys but as real forces. Neo Boys’ Rich Man’s Dreams was actually the first song we played together as Current Affairs to get ourselves started and although you probably can’t hear it, I’m often trying to channel a bit of Greg Sage in my singing.

I saw you are involved with Spitehouse Collective. Can you tell us more about it?
Absolutely. Spitehouse was started by Ymai, then me and Andrew joined in and Gemma popped along later. There were loads of other really great people from Glasgow involved too like Natalie from Comfort (who are a must to check out) and Eilidh from a slew of amazing punk bands in Glasgow (new band Seer is a good place to start), so it was a really nice community feeling. It still technically exists and we’d love to get back to it, but life has got in the way a bit for everyone over the last few years. Ymai started it as a response to quite a laddy feel at the time in Glasgow and wanted to create a strong community that put queer and female music to the front here and bonded with other like-minded people from afar by giving them a place to play too. It was strictly DIY, the sound was often not great, but everyone was treated fairly and we tried to be as inclusive as possible with the places we chose to put things on. Transmission Gallery and Glasgow Autonomous Space (GAS) were really kind to us and would give us free hire which got a lot of money back for the acts whilst being accessible and a bit of a blank canvas for whatever creative direction you wanted to take with the look of the place. The motto was: ‘everyone’s welcome, but don’t get it twisted,’ and I think that sums it up quite well.

Lastly we are named after the biggest selling single of 2001 and so naturally always ask what is your favourite Mariah Carey song?
Oh that’s hard! All I Want For Christmas is the first song I pull out in that run up, usually in November… I don’t especially love Christmas but I love this video and shouting along badly trying to keep up with her. In terms of actual favourite song, I love Fantasy. It’s cool to see how the Tom Tom Club riff can play out in a totally different direction, it’s got her signature layering of beautiful vocal parts in gorgeous harmonies for which I’m a sucker and you can scream it in your bedroom which to me is the sign of the best kind of song.

Current Affair’s new album Off The Tongue is out 14th July via Tough Love Records