Unmarry Me - Lions In Autumn Unmarry Me

When you’re a three-piece, every move must mean. There’s no place to escape, and no one to hide behind. This might be why Unmarry Me’s slim body of recordings so far – one seven inch, one shared single with Lung Leg and Lora Logic, and now this, a five-track EP, Lions in Autumn – reads so clearly; there isn’t a step out of place. It’s a DIY effort, certainly, anti-rockist in intent, a home-made sound-system jerry-rigged into being by three uncontrollable spirits.

Unmarry Me is the unholy trinity of Lise Frances (Help She Can’t Swim), Jon Slade (Huggy Bear, Snoozers) and Chris Rowley (also Huggy Bear, Adulkt Life). They formed in 2025, so their music currently maps territory between possibility and impossibility, wild confidence and creative uncertainty. It’s formative music, still putting itself together as you’re listening, which makes it thrilling, unstable, slightly threatening; as though they’re stealthily shadowing you as you listen, urging you to notice the new in the way they pull together electronics, beats, loops, soundbeds, spoken voices, sung lungs.

It’s collage-like in its aesthetic, and it points backwards, without feeling at all ‘retro’, to an alternate history of British underground creativity; I don’t want to box Unmarry Me in with too many comparisons or precursors, but if you’ve found yourself loving Flaming Tunes, The Vitamin B12, Rimarimba, Inca Eyeball, or the uncompromisingly surreal worlds created by labels like It’s War Boys! or Cordelia Records – well, those are some curious parallels, partly correct, partly dreamt.

Maybe this is a little off beam, but I like to think Unmarry Me exist in a world where music doesn’t need to be stable, or too sure of itself, the better to let all its magic hang out for everyone to hear. And the songs, what are they about? Rowley pitches in with an index of urgent everyday politics as worldly, fleshy, lived experience: “the blandness of evil… the fall of power… small tragedies within bigger tragedies… there’s a danse macabre going along, a skeleton dance amongst graves and ghosts...”

But then there’s the antithesis – the glow within the rot, “they’re all love songs, they’re all flowers in gun barrels and kissed tanks and a firebomb instead of a bunch of flowers… located within is a germ of warmth, a sense of resistance: resistance as romantic thrust.” Resistance as the sound of three people coming together, knowing enough not to know too much, and letting DIY tone flow through the breach.
- Jon Dale