Fightmilk – ‘Contender’

Imagine if, after every failed relationship of your 20s, you wrote down all your emotions and thoughts about it. How would you feel? Would it be a cathartic experience, or would it be something you’d cringe at in years to come, and would any of it make any sense? Well, Fightmilk have done just that – and they’ve turned it into art.

The London four-piece have refined their sound for sophomore record ‘Contender’; a more mature album than their LP ‘Not With That Attitude’, yet still retaining all the sneering barbs on how to traverse millennial life. Not content with dwelling on past break-ups, ‘Contender’ tackles all those good things like working dead-end jobs under a Tory government, emotional labour, and the fact that the world is burning around us.

Musically, the songs feel much more layered, with the band stating that they spent much more time carefully arranging each track. It’s evident that there’s been a different approach to the songwriting compared to ‘Not With That Attitude’, and a prime example is the delicate ‘If You Had A Sister…’ – a lo-fi track utilising synthesizers underneath devastating lyrics of unrequited love.

From the more tender tracks, Fightmilk pack a considerable punch. Lead single ‘Overbite’ is as close as to pop punk as the band like to tread with huge choruses and, in one of the rarer moments on the record, an uplifting tone. Lead vocalist Lily Rae extols the virtues of her desired beau as she belts out “Hey, don’t shut yourself away this time / I think you’re cool, I like your overbite”.

‘Overbite’ is complimented by the equally raucous ‘Hey, Annabelle!’, more fitting with Fightmilk’s earlier material. Among the crowning glories in ‘Contender’ is the soon to be indie floorfiller (well, when those things are allowed to happen again), ‘I’m Starting To Think You Don’t Even Want To Go To Space’, a track that’s akin to taking a huge slice of mid-1990s indie pop and catapulting it into 2021. It’s a wonderful battle between loud and quiet as Rae expertly weaves takedowns of people who think they have all the answers but do nothing about it; those that say they can make the world a better place, but always have a convenient reason for their inaction. In a track of unforgettable lines, “watching Interstellar didn’t make it better / reading Carl Sagan, looking kind of vacant”, really skewers the subject.

There are also moments of self-deprecation in ‘The Absolute State of Me’ and ‘Cool Cool Girl’, both of which deal with Rae railing against the accepted image of the woman in the live music scene. Fightmilk also revisit much more tender moments in the heartbreaking ‘Girls Don’t Want To Have Fun’ and the devastating ‘Maybe’, the latter delivering the gut-punching line “and you know me like your own skin, in the backseat when it’s dark outside / And it’s frightening for a moment, then it’s just like breathing”.

Fightmilk have done the hard yards in ‘Contender’. This is a wonderfully captivating record that is incredibly relatable to anyone who’s worked a soul-sapping job, felt the crush of heartbreak, or boiled with anger listening to hipsters set the world to rights at an open mic night. ‘Contender’ is a collection of the words you wish you’d written down after your last break-up. And therein lies Fightmilk’s magic.

TOM WALSH