For CRAWLERS, things went from zero to one hundred incredibly quickly.
Following their breakthrough 2021 single ‘Come Over (Again)’, the Warrington band were launched into a whirlwind beyond their wildest imaginations. Finding themselves in a new city nearly every day, playing for countless people who resonated deeply with their art, it’s easy to think they were living the dream. In reality though, they were moving at a pace that left them very little room to process what was happening.
Parting ways with their label after the release of 2024 debut album ‘The Mess We Seem To Make’, vocalist Holly Minto, guitarist Amy Woodall and bassist Liv May were forced into an uncertain pause. Faced with figuring out what their future looked like, the trio took the opportunity to rebuild CRAWLERS from the foundations. Returning to the instinctive chemistry that first brought them together as schoolmates, they began writing as a live band again, prioritising time, honesty and the community that has had their backs through every difficult moment.
New EP ‘TURN OFF THE TV’ captures that second life, wrestling with depression, political exhaustion, digital isolation and the pressure to appear fine as the world burns to ashes around us. Ahead of its release, Rock Sound caught up with Holly, Amy and Liv to talk about reclaiming their band, the fans who have pulled them through and the tour that reminded them exactly why they wanted to keep going.
ROCK SOUND: This feels like more than the beginning of another release cycle for the three of you. You’ve described this EP as the introduction to a new version of CRAWLERS. What had to be dismantled and rebuilt for you to reach this point?
HOLLY MINTO: We’ve never fallen out of love with CRAWLERS. CRAWLERS has always been intrinsically us, but I feel like we were searching for the spark that we had at the beginning of our career as kids playing music in a shed. I feel like we lost that when we got thrown through the beautiful, horrendous music industry very quickly. We hadn’t even sat down together to think about why we were doing this, what we were writing for, or what made us CRAWLERS.
We went on a trip to Wales, which became the prologue for us revamping CRAWLERS to what it originally was, but better, more mature, and a lot more jaded in the best way. We reapproached everything and took a big pause. With the quick and easy consumption of life right now, you feel resistant to taking a minute to realise, ‘What are we doing? Are we happy? Is this us?’ We really got to stop, think about that and recalibrate.
RS: When you stripped everything back, what became the core focus as you started making music again?
HOLLY: Putting time into it. One thing we have always done is wear our hearts on our sleeves, and we’ve always put 110 per cent into everything, but the one thing we didn’t have, and felt like it was slipping through our fingers, was time.
Having a breakout viral hit meant that we ended up having to write music on the road while going through extreme change as three working-class women. We then had the expectancy of writing an album that we’d not even thought about, while also being given the best opportunities that we ever could have wished for.
We needed to stop and rethink. We couldn’t just go with this flow that we were being forced into. We’re not a machine. We’re three human beings who really care about what they make and want to put that time in. There was this continuous, relentless pressure to be consistently available, but eventually we just said no. We wanted to restructure who we were and the music we were writing. A lot of that became taking time to make sure these songs were playable as a sweaty band, with the amps turned on, before we even set foot in the studio.
AMY WOODALL: At the time, we were taking all of the opportunities that came our way, and through doing that we learned that we needed to go back to our roots. We went to Wales, and I don’t think there was much pressure on that trip. It was the last thing the label were going to pay for, so we took a holiday, basically. We ended up writing some songs, and the main thing to come out of that was ‘AFRAID TO DIE’. From that point, we were like, ‘Okay, this could work.’ It kickstarted everything and showed us how we want to write in the future.
LIV MAY: ‘AFRAID TO DIE’ was the start of it all. That lit the path. We did feel lost, and it’s hard not to get swept up in everything. Having ‘AFRAID TO DIE’ be that beacon of hope and light, giving us that sense of direction again, was grounding. It was what we needed and what we’d been searching for. It fell into our laps at the time that we needed it most.
RS: When the band’s future felt uncertain, how much did your relationship with the fans influence the decision to keep moving forward?
LIV: They have always been at the centre of everything that we do. We’ve always said from day one that we were doing it for the people who we were as teenagers. We wanted to be the people that we needed when we were their age. They have always been our crutch just as much as they’ve said that we’re theirs. They’re everything to us.
AMY: We managed to see them enough during the two years when we didn’t release anything, too. We did some in-store listening parties to celebrate the album, and it was great to reconnect and be like, ‘Oh my God, these people need us to carry on. We need to pull ourselves together.’
It was the same when we went on the Pierce The Veil tour. Seeing the scope of what this could be, and seeing our fans there, that pulled us back. We couldn’t let everything that had happened weigh us down.
HOLLY: With the short-form consumption of life right now, and this consistent need for more, we were very fortunate that we were allowed to recalibrate, take a minute and re-establish what CRAWLERS were, and still have the most beautiful faces waiting for us on the other side of that journey. It’s so nice that new people are discovering us now, and there’s already this beautiful community there for them to join. It’s way above us now, which is fantastic.
RS: ‘TURN OFF THE TV’ brings together your internal struggles and the wider anxiety of the world around you. How difficult was it to put those feelings into words?
HOLLY: The EP is a culmination of the external and our internal worlds. There’s one lyric in ‘COOL’: ‘My inhabitable mind, but then I look outside // Seems I escaped a fire, to still be burned alive.’ That is intrinsically what this project is about.
We’re very used to talking about our internal suffering, and we’ve always been very political, even before we knew how to voice the words. No matter how you escape that internal suffering, with the societal pressures of life right now and the political travesty of the current climate, when you look outside – the world is still burning.
Getting it down on paper was hard because I felt like I was balancing these internal struggles, but every time I felt a glimpse of hope, it was like, ‘Oh my God, my job’s going to be taken by AI.’ That would make me struggle internally, and it seems like those two things can’t live without each other right now. That is a very generational struggle, so it was about weaving between those two big factors.
RS: The title captures the tension between needing to stay informed and needing to protect yourself from the constant noise. The world is pure chaos right now, and often there’s simply too much information for any of us to take in at once. Do you think there’s an element of people being forced to become numb simply to function?
HOLLY: A lot of what this EP covers is that blissful ignorance. ‘STAY ALIVE’ goes through every political woe I’ve had, but it also opens up the conversation that I’m still lucky to be alive. I still have privilege, and I’m still living in this world. I’m privileged to be able to turn off the TV, limit the noise and limit these factors, but I’m still struggling with it. It’s hard. I get exhausted all the time, and I think we all do.
We’ll go into rehearsal, start catching up and end up having a big conversation about everything that’s happening. We’ll vent about it, and we’re very lucky to have each other in that way, but it does get exhausting.
LIV: There’s the irony of going online to escape what’s happening online, too. Even putting your phone down and trying to connect with the outside world, there’s always something happening. You can’t seem to escape it. We recognise that escapism is a privilege though. People in Gaza can’t escape what’s happening to them. Trans people can’t escape what’s happening to them and the way they’re being treated, especially in this country.
There is always some kind of tragedy. It came out of this frustration and exhaustion of really struggling to find that bit of hope in the world. The news has always been depressing, but the older we get, the worse it seems. There is this massive echo chamber of all of us going, ‘Where the fuck do we go from here? What can we actually do?’ People are trying to move mountains to give people basic human rights. It’s ridiculous.
RS: ‘ALL WE HAVE IS US’ ends the EP by turning towards friendship and human connection, which feels like such a vital way to round this out. What does that song represent about this version of CRAWLERS?
HOLLY: ‘ALL WE HAVE IS US’ is a culmination of the current internal struggle and our rejection of community. When I was writing it, I was in a very doomed relationship, and I felt like I was the most alone I’d ever been while the world was burning. I still had these people around me, but despite knowing the answer was, ‘At least we have each other,’ I didn’t even feel that.
When you’re struggling, you tend to push people away. One of the lines I always go back to is, ‘So I’ll speak to AI, pretend I’m fine // I won’t tell my friends what’s on my mind.’ We have each other, but we are choosing not to reach out because we feel so doomed.
At the end of the song, we went into the studio, all stood around the microphone and sang those last lyrics together. In this doomed place, with all the doomed relationships and the doomed political climate we’re in, we had each other during this process. We were listening back to it the other day, and I was like, ‘That’s so special. I can hear all your voices in there.’ It’s a very special song.
RS: The Pierce The Veil tour arrived at such an important point for you. Did stepping onto those huge stages and seeing the response restore some of the confidence you’d lost?
LIV: One hundred per cent. After that first night, we all got back to the green room, and I sobbed. It was an overwhelming moment, being in such a huge venue with one of the bands that we looked up to growing up and having people in the audience sing back our songs in that capacity.
One of the biggest fears we had after taking such a big step back and taking that time away was, ‘How are people going to react when we come back? Are we going to have those moments again?’
Having that reaction on night one lit that fire. It reassured us that people still cared, and people still want to hear what we have to say. We’ve been so grateful to have people welcome us back so eagerly. Especially as the opening act on that run, to have that reception was overwhelming.
AMY: That first night was like, ‘People care about us, we’re doing something right, and we need to carry on.’ It was surreal and one of the best tours we’ve ever been on. Pierce The Veil and all the other acts were so nice, and genuine fans of our music. Hearing Vic [Fuentes] say that he loved our music was mad.
HOLLY: When you look back, we had to pause. After that show, we got re-signed and relooked at. It proves that we’ve always been a live force. If we didn’t have the opportunity to play Wembley, we still would have released music, but it was like, ‘We are so back.’ We went through a lot of hardships to bring back the foundations of CRAWLERS, and we got to put it to the test on that tour. It made us love what we do more than we ever had.
LIV: I felt like myself again. I felt alive again on that tour. It was really lovely.
RS: Knowing that this EP is the foundation for CRAWLERS’ next era, do you feel more confident about where the band can go from here?
HOLLY: Absolutely. It’s not like we didn’t see a future before, but we were thrown so quickly into the music industry. We were young people who hadn’t had those experiences before and, to be honest, we didn’t have a great support network around us. We were very raw and open, and we needed time to establish that network to support who we were, what we wanted to do and what we wanted to say.
This EP is very much a foundation of where we’re going. We are a live project. We are a sonically open project with a big story to tell about the fight between the internal and external world, and we have lots of fun doing what we do. Honestly, it’s all we want to do.
