A well-known figure on the UK DIY music scene who has performed with bands from Joanna Gruesome and Grubs to Trust Fund, Two White Cranes AKA Roxy Brennan returns with her first new material in a prolific solo career with the brand-new EP Self Build. One half stripped bare electric guitar indie-pop pearls and the other half charming Casiotone electro earworms, all themed around humans and houses and the relationships they share, it’s the Hove-based musician’s debut release on Lost Map Records, and will arrive on December 1, 2023 on limited-edition CD and digital platforms. It’s preceded by the double A-side single ‘City Streets’ b/w ‘Haunting’, a pair of tracks which bookend the Self Build EP and sum-up its two contrasting hemispheres perfectly. 

“This song is about the experience of being a fleshy human living in a city full of concrete and other hard surfaces, says Roxy about ‘City Streets’. “In my day job I work in the beautiful brutalist town hall in Hove, and I love concrete, but it can feel jarring to be such a small soft human body in such a large hard building. I wanted to explore the relationship between bodies, nature and structure in day-to-day life.”

About ‘Haunting’, Roxy says: “Most of the songs on the EP are about the human that builds or lives in the house, but this song is about the house itself and imagining how the house might feel about being built. In this song the house is ambivalent, and that ambivalence is turning against the humans in the house, which is what I imagine a haunted house to be.”

Roxy has been in and around the UK DIY music scene since she was 16, when she played her first gig with Francois (of Francois & the Atlas Mountains fame) in a cafe in Bristol. Between 2013-2016 she was in no less than nine bands, all overlapping, including Joanna Gruesome, Grubs, Towel, Trust Fund, The Nervy Betters and King Of Cats (“very overwhelming,” she reflects). 

Her solo project Two White Cranes started in 2012, when Roxy was working as a temp at a hospital in Oxford. “It’s named after two large constructions cranes I used to walk underneath to get to work every morning,” she says. She released two albums, one split and one EP and toured all around the UK and a bit of Europe. Roxy’s 2015 album Radisson Blue was hailed by Goldflakepaint as “a wonderful achievement; the kind of record that acts as a beacon for this country’s flourishing DIY scene”. But by 2017 she felt burnt out and decided to bring the project to a halt. Six years later, she returns.

“When I started writing all these songs about buildings last summer,” says Roxy, “I decided I wanted to bring the project back, as the theme of construction fitted so nicely. As I have gotten older, Two White Cranes has come to function as a bit of a diary or archive or my own life. I am excited to add to the library.”