“New Ways to Feel Bad” is a debut album from Warsaw garage/folk/punk rockers Guiding Lights. CD contains 13 tracks reminiscent of Pixies, Husker Du or Guided by Voices.
Guiding Lights came into existence in November 2015. “We should say that our beginnings are nothing like other bands”, admits Łukasz (guitar, voice), Asia (bass, voice) and Piotrek (drums). “We started working on almost completed songs and the ones you may hear during our concerts are already the product of our group work. You also need to take into account that one thing remains constant: we always wanted to play good and fast songs. We appreciate bands that may not become famous but at least had great songs that made them respected.”
Guiding Lights describe their music as “primate punk” and apes seem to play a significant role in bands own mythology. “Apes are somewhat of a private obsession for Łukasz who learned to read from ‘Tytus’ comic books. You need to know that if we had not reacted early enough, the band would be called Other Apes. Funny stories aside, we would like to draw some attention to a dying breed of Orangutans and lab-imprisoned chimpanzees from New York Blood Center, abandoned on an island near Liberia’s coast (one of them is pictured on our album cover). ‘Primate punk’ and ‘chimpanzee violence’ are just jokes on genre labels. If you need to attach one to Guiding Lights, we would suggest ‘normcore’ and ‘garage folk’. Deprived of distortions we sound much alike 90’s anti-folk bands and it seems that each and every song we perform is an excercise in rewriting ‘Dear Catastrophe Waitress’.”
As mentioned before, most songs and melodies had been composed before the band even took form but it was during the rehearsals that Asia’s and Piotrek’s input made them sound the way it was originally intended: loud and fast. “We rehearsed frequently and after only four months we were ready to enter the studio. We wanted this album to sound raw but in an intended way, not because of our shortcomings”, says Łukasz.