Here comes a new Boston band called No Hope/No Harm — and it doesn’t appear to be another false alarm.
The “supergroup” was unveiled late last week by frontman Luke O’Neil, the former Good North vocalist and Esquire writer-at-large who has spent the past decade or so not playing in bands, but writing about them. In No Hope/No Harm, named after a lyric in the Smiths’ classic “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”, O’Neil is joined by guitarist Aaron Perrino of the Sheila Divine, drummer Adam Hand of the Field Effect, and bassist James Forbes of Sebio.
No Hope/No Harm posted a rough demo cut of a new song called “This Living Wage”, recorded at Zippah Recording Studios in Brighton, and you can hear a snippet below.
“I suppose it sort of sounds like the Sheila Divine meets the Good North, surprisingly!” O’Neil tells Vanyaland when asked for a brief description of their musical direction (he is not wrong). “At least on this first song ‘This Living Wage’, for sure — sort of melancholy grandeur — but a lot of the songs are really tight pop-punky type stuff, and some are sort of classic ’90s emo sounding.”
The band is looking to play their first show sometime in December, and have about eight songs currently in the works. O’Neil jokes that the working titles of the tracks are “the Strokes one, the Hotelier one, the Cure one, the Blink 182 one.”
And he has no apprehension towards naming the group after a Morrissey lyric.
“Aaron proposed the name, and we were all into it right away, which is so much easier than the usual endless process of picking a band name,” he says. “I think he must have subliminally thought of it by looking at my tattoo of those Smiths lyrics during practice. Obviously he and I are huge Morrissey fans, and there can never be enough bands named after the Smiths.”
In related news, the Sheila Divine play Great Scott in Allston on November 12, an all-star bill that includes Dirty Bangs, Vic Firecracker, and DJ Jen.
And a few additional look-ins during studio time, via O’Neil’s Facebook.
