Based in London and exploring a cinematic soundscape with a mix of Ennio Morricone-tinged indie rock bangers and desert rock, The Howlers released their debut album What You’ve Got To Lose To Win It All last year. Not only was their debut album a great success and saw the band claim a Top 15 position on the independent charts – on some European charts even at 6^th place – they did all the work by themselves after being rejected by more than 70 labels who didn’t believe in frontman Adam Young’s sonic visions.

However, The Howlers’ rise to the stars started earlier than that. The band gained lots of attention for their debut single “La Dolce Vita” in 2019 – and then the pandemic arrived and paralyzed the music industry. But Adam found solace in locking himself into a room in his childhood home and didn’t do anything but write songs. The pandemic EP The Sum of Our Fears saw the band feeding their increasing fanbase with the best EP to date, and when the world returned to normal they released a string of brilliant singles and EPs, serving as teasers for their upcoming 2024 debut album, and established the band in the indie scene. With their debut album chart success, they subsequently sold out seventeen-date UK tour, despite no label support, thus solidifying their place as one of the UK’s most unique independent bands.

In 2025, The Howlers embarked on their first European headliner tour playing eleven dates in six countries, and when they popped by Hebebühne in Hamburg we took the chance to sit down with Adam for a chat about working independently without a label, his thoughts on working with labels for the upcoming second album, and writing authentic music and lyrics that tap into people’s real-life experiences. And we also get the answer to why UK peeps love Hamburg.

Debut album rejections

It’s great to finally have you for a chat after last year’s amazing debut album. You’re out on your first European tour, right? How has Europe treated you so far?

“Yeah, headlining tour. We’ve done shows in Europe before, but it’s the first time we’re taking the responsibility of a headliner and playing shows on our own, and it has been great so far. To be honest, Europe compared to back home is massive difference. The hospitality is better here, the pay’s better here, the food’s way better here, the people are better here, and the venues are better here. We haven’t had a bad show, so it’s been great”.

Didn’t your debut album get a much better reception in Europe compared the UK as well?

“I guess it did. It’s weird because obviously our album did a lot better in Europe than it did in the UK in terms of reviews and people picking up on it. But then, if you think about the tour that we did associated with that album back home; we did seventeen dates and I think fourteen of them were sold out. Even without the magazines and the radio back home, we still sold out venues”.

“It’s slightly different when you’re here because it’s like you’re going into new territory. People still have the excitement to come see you as a new band. So yeah, it’s been cool to come to play these places where the record did so well and where people took hold of the record with both hands and loved it”.

We took it to 73 labels and
we got 73 rejections

As I understand it, you didn’t get much support in the beginning and nobody wanted to sign you back home. So you did it all yourself?

“It was weird in the UK, let’s start with that. We recorded the album and we were super proud of it. Like, we created something that doesn’t sound like anything else, and then we took it to 73 labels and we got 73 rejections and didn’t really understand why (laugh). A lot of people were saying that we weren’t ready for an album and a lot of people were giving other excuses. So, we sat down and just said, ‘Let’s do it ourselves’. Why? Because what can’t we do ourselves? Why do we need a label? It’s probably the best thing we ever did”.

“For an independent band, without talking too much business into it, the cost of the album was high, but we recouped 80% of it in six months which is unheard of for an independent band. Whenever we talk to people back home in other bands about it, they’re like, ‘You really did that? Fantastic!’. These bands are still in debt to labels and we’re kind of out of that debt doing our thing. I wouldn’t change it for anything”.

It must feel like a huge revenge for you, like a big ‘Fuck you’ to the people who never believed in you?

“Yeah, definitely. I’ve sort of finished writing the next album, and I’m going to go back to the same labels and I’m going to say, ‘If you want this record there’s a couple of more zeros on the end now’ because we got our first one at number fifteen (at the charts) independently, and even at number six in some charts. And in Europe, we hit even higher. So, I’m going to say, ‘If you want it, then you’re going to have to put your money where your mouth is’ because I did that, I took on the risk and I proved them all wrong”.

“That’s kind of what we’ve seen in our live feeds as well, like the live feeds back home when we did the album tour last year. I had a lot of promoters pulling me aside before shows and apologizing and saying, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry for undercutting you’ or ‘So sorry for putting you in a smaller venue than I thought’. I wouldn’t say I’m a revenge man, but I like to prove people wrong”. (laugh)

How are you thinking about getting a label for the second album? Do you really need a label now that you have learned how it works and have started to build your own network? You have a publishing deal already and you work with Kinda Agency in Europe for booking gigs.

“The short answer is no. I don’t know what it’s like in Europe, but back home, for a lot of bands, it’s the other way around. A lot of bands have a label before they have a publisher, so we’ve been very fortunate since day one to have been signed to Warner for publishing. And we do very well in the States with that, and got a lot of TV work from that”.

“You don’t need a label. Like a lot of my team and a lot of the people that we work with say, me as an artist is very unique. I’m very driven, I know what I’m doing, and I’m very clued up. People can’t pull the wool over my eyes and lie to me about things, which is good and which is kind of why I like going to labels and say, ‘You want this record?’, and then they try and fob you off and I would go, ‘That’s not how it works’. It would be interesting to see what financially is put on the table effectively. Apart from that, I don’t need it, I really don’t”.

“Actually, a couple of months after the album came out we could have got an independent number one, but a variant of the record that we did was sold out in six minutes. There was three times the demand for what we pressed, but if we had done that we would have got an independent number one. Most bands would be sad about that, but I kind of think of it as ‘Well, you’ve got somewhere to grow to and you got somewhere to go to next time’. Otherwise, if I’d got an independent number one on the debut album, then it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, what do I do next time?’. I mean, you can’t go better than that really unless you get an official chart number one. But then you have to be selling countless and countless records. So, realistic expectations is the name of the game”.

Songs that tell stories

Without label support, The Howlers DIY released their debut album What You’ve Got To Lose To Win It All last year. However, the journey the band had to make to even record and release the album has been one of personal grief and struggles. Adam lost two family members during the pandemic and struggled with serious health problems which almost stopped the whole project.

Luckily, fate wanted different and things turned for the better, and in May last year, the album found its way to the record stores and was an instant hit. With fuzzy bass lines, the cinematic panache of Ennio Morricone, and Americana-sounding guitar riffs, the band released something unique in the music scene, a stand-out album sounding completely different from the rest of the post-punk and art rock-dominated UK scene.

But there’s change on the horizon. Adam tells us that he moves from the cinematic landscape of A Fistful of Dollars on What You’ve Got To Lose To Win It All to Blade Runner on the sophomore album.

It’s soon a year since you released What You’ve Got To Lose To Win It All and what makes it stand out to me is that you bring trumpets back to music, thus adding a cinematic feel that I haven’t heard in years. I get Ennio Morricone vibes from “How Long” for instance.

“Yeah a little bit, but you know what? I’m big into film and cinema and that’s what I wanted the record to be, a soundtrack so people could listen to it and feel the characters and feel the message. That’s what it’s about”.

“But the trumpet is a funny one because it just plays into the iconography of what we do as a band. Back in the UK, especially, if you have a saxophonist in your band at the moment, you’ll be chart-topping. Someone said to me once, ‘Get a saxophonist’, and I was like, ‘No, I’m not doing that’. So I kind of did that (the trumpet) as a bit of a joke (laugh)”. But it was just by chance that we ended up doing that. The producer, Chris, actually lived next door to a young lad who played trumpet and they recorded that in his bedroom – I wasn’t in the studio when that happened. I told Chris I wanted the trumpet part on it and he just produced this trumpet part out of nowhere and I was like, ‘That’s perfect, that’s what it’s about’”.

“I’m really proud of how cinematic the album is, but now that’s done. Now onto the next big thing”.

You’ve played the album through so many times by now, and when you look back at the whole process of writing the songs while going through a very tough period both as a band and you personally, it’s evident in your storytelling on the album, has touring the album been sort of a therapy where you can share what you’ve been through with an audience?

“I think as a songwriter you have to write a song that tells a story. I was talking about this yesterday when I had an interview on Radio Eins Berlin, and I got asked a very similar question, and my answer was exactly what I’m going to say now: Any good song should tell a story. It has to tell a story that the listener connects with and understands. As a songwriter, you can only do that if you tell it from a place of emotion. That being said, once that story is out and you’ve told it and you’ve had that cathartic experience to release that emotion, come to terms with it, and have put it into a song, that’s it. That’s done and it’s boxed off for you”.

“You see like massive songwriters and massive artists being reduced to tears onstage because they’re playing a song. But that’s not particularly because of that song, it’s because of how the people are reacting to it. So, once you’ve written a song, you’ve poured your heart out into it and you’ve had your healing experience, it’s now down to the fans to give you that back by how they connect with it”.

Isn’t it also about being authentic? Rather than writing about made-up stories that you as a songwriter don’t have any relation to, taking them from your own experiences makes them authentic which resonates with people.

“That’s it really. You have to tell something that people understand and that people can get hold of, really. You know, a big problem with a lot of music from the early 2000s is that it’s often called landfill indie back home. We’ve been listening to a lot of it in the van while we’ve been driving around Europe, and it doesn’t really tell a story. When you listen to the lyrics it’s just a mishmash of funny-sounding things. That’s why it doesn’t have longevity. I’ve always wanted to have an album that I don’t care if it blows up to number one, but if in twenty years’ time someone comes up to me and says, ‘Oh, that song is still so important to me in my life’ I would be happy. That’s what I want”.

“I’m not an egotistical frontman by the way (laugh). I should be but I’m not”.

But if you’d love to have fans coming up to you and tell you how much your debut album still means to them in, let’s say, twenty years then, how about yourself? Are you the retrospective type that clings on to what you did in the past, like not letting go of older songs?

“I think most good artists won’t really listen to their works. The thing with me is that once I wrote that album, and recorded the album, that was it. I didn’t really listen to it again for a long time. I still haven’t listened to that album for about six months or seven months mainly because I’m playing it all the time. But it’s nice to go back to a record that you wrote, put it on, and listen to it like how you intended the listener to feel it”.

You said something about having another album coming up kind of soon earlier. I guess you got a lot of time to write songs during the pandemic and maybe already have a second album ready for being released.

“I mean like this. The most of this album was started during the pandemic. What happened was that we were a band for only a very short period of time before the pandemic, about six months. Our debut single came out and exploded in the UK; we often joked that it was our peak. And then we released the second single even if we didn’t have a good enough single to follow up, but that’s how we got a publishing deal, and then the pandemic happened. Instead of kind of sticking to our guns and digging our feet in, I ripped everything up and started again, and I said, ‘No, this is not good enough, it can be better’. Then we wrote the first EP and that did really well, but it still wasn’t good enough for me”.

“I was writing every day, and I was in this little box room because I got stuck in my parents’ house. So, here I was in my twenties stuck in my parents’ house writing music every day, and that started the foundation of a lot of this album. The basis of a lot of these songs started there. The second EP came out of that writing session, and in the end of 2022, we recorded the album. It didn’t come out until 2024, but we recorded it in October 2022 because that’s how long things take, actually”.

If album one is like ‘A Fistful of
Dollars’, then album two is kind
of like ‘Blade Runner’.

It’s quite an ambitious album with fifteen songs on it. Kevin, the photographer, hadn’t listened to your record until today and his first words were ‘Man, that’s a lot of songs’.

“We actually went to the studio and did seventeen tracks in eight days, so it was pretty intense. I’ve got some great pictures of the team we were in the studio with. We actually had an engineer from Hamburg called Christoph Skirl, who is an amazing engineer. We often call him the wizard. But we broke him; there were so many times we’d go into the control room and he’d be asleep”. (laugh)

“Basically, we were doing like two tracks a day, and Christoph said a really lovely thing to me at the end of it actually. He pulled me aside and said he’d never seen a band record to that high a standard in that short period of time. Most bands do ten to twelve tracks. Why not do fifteen? Why not do seventeen? Most of the tracks got released. We actually dropped one or two and then we did the deluxe version which I think was like twenty something tracks, including demos and rarities and things we didn’t record. But a lot of people moaned about it being a lot of tracks, you know. A lot of critics were like, ‘Too long’. That’s like going to a buffet and saying there’s too much food”. (laugh)

“Like I said, that record was recorded in 2022, so by May 2024 when the record came out I was a different person, I’ve written more songs since then. It was kind of frustrating for me because we were doing that tour where I was like, ‘I’ve got better songs but I can’t play them. I can’t do anything with them because I have to do this album’. That’s why on this European tour, I just put my foot down. We’re going to play thirteen or fourteen songs today and four of them are new songs. It’s kind of like going, ‘Let’s test the water’. So far, they’re the songs that people love the most in the set. It’s validating as an artist to know your progression”.

“I’m going in a different direction, slightly – it’s cinematic in a different way. If album one is like ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, then album two is kind of like ‘Blade Runner’”.

*****

Wrapping things up with a last question which is slightly off track. I lived in the UK quite many years before I moved to Hamburg and every time friends of mine came back from a trip to Hamburg they told me how awesome it was. Why is Hamburg so special for Brits?

“We were talking about it in the van, actually, and there is one word you can say, which is prostitutes (our photographer corrects Adam; it’s ‘sex workers’), but that doesn’t really go down very well with people”. (laugh)

“I think Hamburg has a rich cultural history, musically. There’s some amazing venues and community spaces around venues here. I’m not a massive Beatles fan. I do not like the Beatles much at all but people back home put them on a pedestal. They came to Hamburg as one of the first places outside the UK, and the Beatles are like religion back home. So, it’s going to be linked to that a little bit – and sex workers. It’s English people we’re talking about”. (laugh)

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Photographer: Kevin Winiker

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