Sea Girls

Sea Girls formed as a London quartet whose sound channels anthemic indie rock from the early 2000s. Through successive EPs that attracted BBC Radio support and a growing audience, the group reached the U.K. Top Five with their first major-label album, Open Up Your Head, released in 2020. They sustained the same four-piece configuration for Homesick in 2022, which again entered the Top Five, and for Midnight Butterflies in 2024, their initial outing on an independent imprint.

Frontman and principal songwriter Henry Camamile, drummer Oli Khan, lead guitarist Rory Young, and bassist Andrew Noswad hail from Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, and Kent yet first connected at school by performing in one another’s groups. After attending separate universities, they reconvened in London once their studies ended and adopted the name Sea Girls for its open-ended quality, drawn from a misheard line in Nick Cave’s “Water’s Edge.” Shifting from earlier textural and groove-oriented projects, they prioritized foregrounding the song itself and targeting expansive choruses in the manner of the Killers and Bastille.

The approach yielded immediate results when “Call Me Out,” the opening cut from their June 2017 EP of the same name, received BBC Radio 1 airplay and triggered numerous festival bookings. Later that year the band issued “Lost” and “What For” ahead of the Heavenly War EP, which surfaced in January alongside a headline U.K. tour. Their June 2018 release Adored paved the way for debut slots at Reading & Leeds, where they had previously attended as spectators, while the standalone single “All I Want to Hear You Say” closed the year. Placement on the BBC Sound of 2019 list early in the new year markedly raised their visibility.

Following the February 2019 arrival of the buoyant “Open Up Your Head,” Polydor signed the quartet, and “Damage Done” appeared as their first major-label single midway through the year. Festival appearances that summer encompassed repeat visits to Reading & Leeds plus shows at Truck and Benicàssim, after which they supported Foals in Russia. The assured, upbeat “Violet” preceded their inaugural U.S. dates in New York and Los Angeles in December. Named an MTV “One to Watch” the following month, they issued their fourth EP, Under Exit Lights, in March, then watched Open Up Your Head debut at number three on the U.K. album chart in August 2020.

Sea Girls maintained momentum with September’s “Accident Waiting to Happen,” featured in the Dirt 5 soundtrack, and continued issuing tracks such as December 2020’s “This Is the End” and February 2021’s “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” before a U.K. headline tour in April. August brought the introspective “Sick,” followed later in the year by “Again Again” and “Hometown.” Homesick, recorded in Brixton and California with producers Larry Hibbitt, Cass Lowe, Jonny Coffer, and Jacknife Lee, incorporated those three singles and matched the debut’s number-three U.K. peak upon its 2022 release.

The band chose independence for the 2023 concert album The Hometown Tour Live, documenting their performance at Alexandra Palace the previous year. Midnight Butterflies, issued in June 2024 on their own ALT Records label, entered the U.K. chart at number five. Among its many contributors were producer-songwriters Oli Jacobs (Taylor Swift, Peter Gabriel), Daniel Bryer (Niall Horan), Nick Hahn (Rita Ora), and Matt Schwartz (Yungblud).