Snapped Ankles

In 2011 a mysterious London-based post-punk outfit called Snapped Ankles came together once several friends started performing in the gaps between other acts and amid parties held inside a shared warehouse on Brick Lane. Homemade synths and experimental production techniques gradually shaped the group’s emerging sound, while performance-art theatrics joined Lightning Bolt, Fela Kuti, Morris dancing and Old Norse texts among the influences audible on the 2017 debut album Come Play the Trees. From the outset the members maintained a deliberate focus on presentation, electing to withhold their real identities and confirming only four permanent personnel plus a handful of transient contributors. Their habit of jamming along to films during warehouse events translated into the groove-driven approach that characterized many early recordings.

The first release arrived in 2012 with the single “True Ecology (S**t Everywhere),” soon followed by “I Want My Minutes Back,” a track that revealed the band’s debt to raw post-punk textures and the motorik pulse of Krautrock. Snapped Ankles forged a tight correspondence between sound and spectacle by combining electronic music with vintage analog percussion synths fastened to logs and by appearing in ghillie suits that mimicked vegetation, thereby cultivating a twenty-first-century pagan atmosphere. In 2017 the Leaf Label reissued the second single, after which the band’s release schedule intensified: the four-track EP The Best Light Is the Last Light appeared that same year, the debut long-player Come Play the Trees arrived shortly afterward, the second EP Violations followed in 2018, and the sophomore album Stunning Luxury surfaced in early 2019. On the third album, Forest of Your Problems, issued in 2021, the group merged the naturalistic atmosphere of its first record with the societal-structure themes explored on the second while preserving the dance-oriented escapism for which it had become known.