The Guest List are a Manchester-based five-piece who quickly gathered a large fan base on TikTok when they were only 16. Four years on, the band are now travelling the world and working full-time as musicians having successfully made the transition to creating original music and maintaining a large audience with over 100k monthly listeners on Spotify. 

The group appeared over Zoom as they prepared to play the first of two shows in Japan, one at Summer Sonic Tokyo and the second at Summer Sonic Osaka. These performances came just a matter of weeks before their debut album ‘Something Real’ was released on Friday, August 28.

Social media is often a point of frustration for new musicians because it offers a portal to stardom if you play your cards correctly, however the work needed to get there can become a hindrance. This additional element creates what is essentially a completely different job to the already demanding role of a musician. 

Having already tackled this issue and accumulated an audience early on in their career through posting covers online, the boys know how to navigate this challenge. Lead singer Cai Alty said: “We struggled with finding an engaged audience, converting the audience that’s there into a fan base that wants to hear our own music… can be difficult, so I kind of understand why everyone gets very frustrated with TikTok… but I think you’ve got to see the positives, see the fact that it gives you access to your own audience that you just wouldn’t have had twenty years ago, it gives the audience a lot more control.”

Given this perspective, it is only fitting that the lead single and title track of their new record shares a commentary on the bizarre relationship between music and social media. Cai explained that “bands have to break through the filter of social media now and the difficult thing about that is that it’s not built for music marketing even though that’s how we try and use it.

“Really it’s built to feed whatever impulses you have, it is trying to keep you on the app, and that doesn’t necessarily have to be in a good way or a bad way and usually it is in a bad way. With all that context and with all that experience of trying to make videos which can break through on social media, it felt like an apt thing to write about.

“‘Something Real’ is probably the most objectively political song (on the album), I remember when I wrote it I felt a little bit nervous because, while we had songs before which were political, it was maybe in a more a veiled way, like an obscured way, whereas ‘Something Real’ feels very dire.”

This led to a discussion about how the band choose what to write about and whether they ever feel a responsibility to utilise the platforms they have and deepen the way they explore particular topics.

Cai shared the sentiment that “you definitely feel a responsibility and I understand as artists get bigger, I think that they feel the weight of that responsibility more and more.” 

“If they feel that they have the power of influencing something by talking out against it or raising money for it then they should do that… but at the same time, I’m of the opinion that any effort to do that is positive and I don’t think that every artist feels like they should have to necessarily talk about current events because that doesn’t necessarily effect good change if you feel like you have to. Not every artist is in the place where they necessarily want to be and I do think it’s okay to make music because you just want to make music.”

Many bands do opt to offer music as an escape, the ever evolving guitar scene in the UK right now is showcasing different ways to simply enjoy music rather than dwell on the current state of the world. Cai said that “the UK scene around our age, it feels like it’s on the cusp, I’m sure every band ever has always felt like this because obviously you get into the scene and you’ve lifted the lid and you realise just how many bands there are, but it definitely feels like everyone is growing together…. I think it’s quite an exciting time to be a new band in the UK”.

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