Midding - Nowhere Near Today

With the release of debut EP Nowhere Near Today on 7th February,
Tough Love welcomes Cardiff-based five-piece Midding to the family. The idea for the band was originally conceived by singer-guitarist
Joe Woodward whilst writing and recording songs in his kitchen on a 4-track recorder, and over time eventually found help from like-
minded friends, Elliot Roberts and Cam Wheeler. The three of them would spend their nights experimenting with cassette recording
with the admirable if not challenging aim to recreate the symphonic sounds of Phil Spector on a DIY budget. With growing confidence
and having amassed a small catalogue of songs, a few aborted attempts were made to get a live band together before they found help
from a second guitarist, Eli Allison, who had recently relocated from Cornwall. As necessity would dictate, the first shows as a quartet
made use of a drum machine, but the ideal formation for the band wasn’t truly complete until meeting Nia Abraham, whose live
drumming would add a more physical quality to the band’s sound. At the beginning of 2024, they began working more purposefully
towards an end goal with the writing and recording of the five-song Nowhere Near Today EP. Though retaining some of their home
recording practices, they also made use of a studio facility based in a disused shopping centre basement that was made available
through SHIFT, a local artist collective connected to the band. The acquisition of an 8-track Tascam 488MKII, along with the natural
reverb of SHIFT’s empty concrete space allowed for further opportunity to experiment with both cassette recording techniques and their
still developing live sound, the two environments permitting an all-too-rare creative freedom. The process was transformative for the
group, their Spector-inspired ambitions now taking on a more defined shape that skirted around the edges of psych, noise-rock and
industrial-pop in a way that increasingly became their own. For a debut EP, the results are impressively realised, a confluence of
expansive tremolo guitars, a deliberately primordial rhythm section and a contrasting vulnerable vocal performance that’s both melodic
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and bracing. It’s a record born both of private experimentation and public performance, who they are on stage and what they express
on record informing the other but still distinctly each their own thing, shifting then dovetailing like the waves of feedback that wash
through Nowhere Near Today. Still a young band, it’s tomorrow they feel a lot closer to