It’s 2010, and you’re lying in your bedroom with your lava lamp casting an amber glow on your ceiling as you “sit back and ponder life”. Alex Turner’s Submarine EP is crackling in the background as it rotates on your turntable and you think about how difficult it is to be a young adult in this day and age. At least that’s how I spent my teenage years following the release of Richard Ayoade’s film by the same name. I like to imagine it’s also what The Lathums’ 20-year-old frontman Alex Moore was doing when his 16-year-old self picked up his guitar and wrote ‘All My Life’.
Produced at Parr Street Studios in Liverpool by The Coral’s James Skelly, the track is the first release with major label Island Records, who signed the Wigan four-piece back in March. It’s difficult to wrap your head around the fact that Moore was a mere teenager wrote this song; it’s wistful, and optimistic in the same breath. He said: “I had already had a lot of life experience by then, I was and still feel like an old head on young shoulders. When I read the lyrics it’s actually quite optimistic, so I was probably looking to my guitar to escape. Make sense of the world. Make a new version of the world for myself.”
Nostalgia is a word that gets bandied about in music journalism far too frequently, but there’s really no better word for the way ‘All My Life’ transports you back in time. The accompanying music video, shot on vintage Super 8 film perfectly captures the spirit of the early 2010s, where disposable cameras were found in abundance at house parties and sixteen-year-olds donned their Dad’s vintage denim jackets in desperate attempts to fit in with a certain ‘indie’ aesthetic that dominated Twitter and Tumblr at the time.
Having landed in the UK Album Charts with their extended EP, The Memories We Make and with support dates for Blossoms, DMAs and Paul Weller on the horizon there’s no doubt this band is going places.
Words by Beth Kirkbride