Lunch Money Life

London-based boundary pushing five piece Lunch Money Life are back with their new single, the curiously-titled ‘Jimmy J Sunset’, a track that shimmers with a blend of jazz-fusion, Jungle and Thrash, spurning solos in favour of hyper maximalism. Lunch Money Life have already shown their propensity for creating tracks out of riffs that crisscross with a riotous fervour, and ‘Jimmy J Sunset’ is no different.

The new single comes as a response of sorts to their previous single, ‘Nicolas Cage Please Get In Touch’, after reportedly receiving a cease and desist from Cage’s Hollywood lawyer, ‘Jimmy J Sunset’. The band explain: “Last summer we had a run in with an aggressive American lawyer, an experience so stressful we had to write a song about it. “Jimmy J Sunset” is an expression of the pure anxiety felt when one of your childhood heroes decides to begin legal proceedings against you.”

Late last year, Lunch Money Life released their industrial, shapeshifting EP ‘Tarmac the Lake’ via Wolf Tone which features the aforementioned ‘Nicolas Cage Please Get In Touch’ alongside lead single ‘Human Sacrifice,’ which opens the EP with a piercing scream, then plunges into a pummelling industrial beat, before shapeshifts hypnotically before your ears into a serpentine progressive jazz melody which flits in and out of focus.

Using the church that Spencer Martin plays organ for as their rehearsal space, plus sporadic sessions elsewhere, over the past few years Lunch Money Life – completed by his friends Stewart Hughes, Sean Keating and Luke Mills-Pettigrew, plus his brother Jack – recorded what would become their debut album, 2020’s ‘Immersion Chamber’. It’s a record that runs the gamut; combining gorgeous and glacial swells of electronically augmented brass, skull-rattling heavy psych grooves and more, with nimble twists and turns of pace at every corner of its labyrinthine structure. 

Thanks in part to a supreme mixing job by Danalogue, of The Comet Is Coming it was a dark and dramatic trip, what the band semi-jokingly (and somewhat prophetically, given that it was released just a month into the first coronavirus lockdown) described as ‘apocalypse music’. If at their most sporadic they could produce a record so intense, they wondered, just how far could they take it going forwards?

The band had been active in one form or another for almost a decade, since they started as the twelve-piece musical wing of a charity venture that failed to take off, but when their debut album was finished they hit the reset button. At the same time, the band moved churches following repeated robberies – the hard drive containing all their music survived only by chance – upping sticks to a sister church in Hackney, which has a lockable inside door. Concurrently they streamlined their gear, the Martin brothers cramming their sprawling equipment into custom-made live setups.

For all their theatrics on record, Lunch Money Life’s peak has always been found when playing live with one another. They deliver a blistering show, pushing their considerable instrumental skills to the brink of all-out collapse, yet like so many others the band were entirely deprived of that release once lockdown began. Now the end is in sight, Lunch Money Life are not just at their sharpest, but their boldest too.