Real Lies

NEVER SLEEP presents a lesson in the dangers of suburban time travel and piss-head nationalism on SINKING SUBURB, the new EP from REAL LIES.

The small-town storytelling of Kevin Lee Kharas and Patrick King channels Stephen King via Paul Weller on their latest release, with a dreamlike narrative taking in family feuds, wayward girlfriends, funfair beatings, the long-defunct high-street poster shop Athena and the tendency for teenage Edens to curdle into dystopias behind your back.

All three tracks instantly conjure their own eerie, electronic atmospheres that shine and surge like the sun across motorway-adjacent football pitches. We left some words below to the conquistadors themselves…

"SINKING SUBURB is about returning to a childhood hometown that has been trapped in a bubble and eerily preserved behind a time-resistant wall as the world has changed all around it. It’s about the surreal events that take place upon that return to an Eden-turned-sinister, where the air glows bottle green.

In SHIRLEY ROAD, I return to my hometown on the run from some unspecified crime and find my dad still dozing on the family sofa, as Cremonese and Atalanta play out a bore draw on TV. The sounds of a dial-up modem punctuate the silence of one of those dead Sundays that used to serve as a reliably tedious end to every working week, before the internet tore life off its temporal hinges and made boredom a thing of the past. Anyway, basically I hope to find sanctuary there but instead find a town that hunts me like prey because I’m an intruder from a different time, the walls beneath the posters in Athena growing teeth as I’m chased across the strange landscape

SHADOWLANDS is a reminiscence of how we used to make our fun in my hometown: making peace with imminent death in my mate Dan’s blood red 1.4 Vauxhall Nova. Dan was known as the fastest, most reckless driver in our hometown and we would get stoned and let him bomb us up and down country lanes while listening to old Stevie Hyper D tape packs. It was incredibly stupid but in the moment felt like an escape, at least until the engine stopped running

I REMEMBER HIGH STREETS is a suburban revenge fantasy in which the real reason for my return is revealed: I have come back to confront the traitor Simon Mahon, who I’m still convinced was getting off with my first love when I was 15 years old. My secrets can no longer hurt me, the town’s hold on me is loosening and I am ready to defeat its final boss

The whole EP is inspired by Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, broken glass and memory loss"