‘From Caplan To Belsize’ saw Muncie Girls standing up to the things they disagreed with.
Written over two and a half years, the band made it up as they went along, following a gut feeling and the loosely trodden path of what their friends’ bands typically did. Created within the community bubble of Exeter’s The Cavern, their debut album saw them grapple with feelings of escape, uncertainty and unease while feeling distant from the world at large. “All my life I’ve felt let down, and that’s perhaps why we feel safer underground,” offered ‘Learn In School’, but still, Muncie Girls never turned away from the spotlight.
After its release, the band went everywhere. Playing shows and bringing that carefully crafted sense of home turf community with them, their fizzing anthems protested giving in or accepting the way things were by singing songs of the normal, everyday struggle. There was a belligerent flicker of hope. A roaring belief that your quiet, unspoken worries weren’t alone, and neither were you.
“At the time, we just took it day by day and had a great time travelling around and having nice things said to us. Looking back, I realise how lucky we were with that whole album. People were so nice, and we had so many opportunities,” says Lande Hekt. Before they released their debut, the band carried themselves with this naïve, shiny, optimistic shrug. This sense that “we’ve made some songs and we think they’re good. We haven’t really thought much beyond that, but we’re just going to put them out, and we’re just going to see what happens.”
“We didn’t know that anyone would even care. At that point, we had so many friends, and people that play in bands and go to shows in our the scene, who we knew would support us and be nice about it. That was kind of why we were doing it because that’s what being in a band meant to us. It still is the main thing, going to shows and operating within a scene, but it was just this bizarre thing of people who we didn’t know caring about it as well. That’s weird, but it was awesome.”
