Surf Curse - SWX - 8th October 2022

Surf Curse – a band forged in the fires of Las Vegas when frontman Nick Rattigan and guitarist Jacob Rubeck were just kids – has a uniquely American sensibility, but their songs leave even the stiffest English upper lip quivering.

They take to the stage like four loners thrown together. The members look intensely mismatched: it’s a world where a Hell’s Angel could be in a band with the boy next door. It’s only when they start to play that one understands the brotherhood these men share.

Rattigan is understood by his band simply by rolling back to the whites of his eyes as he howls. They may be outsiders, but they are at one with one other. They’re a band steeped in fantasy – their songs are written about films like Heathers, Twin Peaks, and The Doom Generation - but what they share is stranger than fiction.

The audience thump like the bass against the walls of a teenage house party. The fans are decorated by heart shaped sunglasses and leather jackets; all the fixings of the Americana movie scenes Surf Curse’s music depends on. Curly mops of hair bounce like the refracted light of a disco ball on prom night.

Their song ‘Heathers’ is introduced with a countdown orchestrated by the band. The tension is palpable, and the song rips through the crowd like barbed wire through a negligée. A cymbal falls from Rattigan’s drum kit with all the drama of a soap opera victim, but he kicks it away with a Californian ease. Their songs may be about teenagers, but they’ve got the experience of a lifetime to deal with dramas onstage.

Their music speaks almost continuously to this feeling of being alone; their most famous song, ‘Freaks’, rounds off their set with the catharsis of a Greek tragedy. Although the song was first released in 2013 and written when Rattigan and Rubeck were teenagers, it shot to fame over the summer of 2021 through the power of social media.

There’s always a chance that music that does so well online falls flat in the realm of the real world, but the opposite is true of Surf Curse. Their music makes your eyes water when it’s playing through your earphones, but it urges you to shout, love, and take revenge when heard live.

The audience scream the words back to the band as if they wrote the lyrics themselves. It’s a testament, ironically, to how universal the feeling of being alone is. It’s impossible at a gig like this, though, for that feeling to ever linger.

In their music, Surf Curse bottle these states of whimsy, desire, eroticism, and yearning. Onstage, they offer each person in the crowd a glass.