The Surfing Magazines formed in 2017 as a U.K. garage rock band whose sound pulled together surf-rock, jazz, oddball pop, and Americana. Two Leicestershire-formed Wave Pictures members—vocalist and guitarist David Tattersall plus bassist Franic Rozycki—teamed with multi-instrumentalist Charles Watson from Sheffield’s Slow Club and drummer Dominic Brider. The quartet promptly joined the roster of Moshi Moshi, the same imprint that had already issued the Wave Pictures’ 2016 album Bamboo Diner in the Rain and Slow Club’s fourth and final release that year, One Day All of This Won't Matter Anymore. Drawing lyrical ideas from noir fiction through late-’50s and early-’60s European cinema, the group entered the studio with loose song fragments that were swiftly shaped into finished tracks and captured on tape. The resulting wry, immediate debut surfaced in September 2017 under the band’s own name and sat closer in spirit to the Wave Pictures’ catalog than anything else.
Activity then stalled for five years. Watson issued his first post-Slow Club solo album, Now That I'm a River, in 2018 before stepping back from music temporarily. Rozycki and Tattersall rejoined the Wave Pictures, and Tattersall later supplied lead guitar across five Bob Dylan-inspired albums released by Billy Childish’s William Loveday Intention in 2020 and 2021. In March 2021 the Surfing Magazines resurfaced with the single “Sports Bar,” a track that nodded toward both Pavement and the Velvet Underground. The single paved the way for their second album, Badgers of Wymeswold, which appeared later that year—sixteen months after it had been recorded in Rochester, Essex.
