Cuecliché talk about new ‘The Cliché EP’ – catchy riffs that hark back to the early 2000s

            Cuecliche's Terry Rytz was inspired to post a “musicians wanted” ad on Gumtree, following an acoustic Blink 182 show he’d seen at Banquet records. After what the band now describe as, “many a false dawn”, he finally met Jake at a bar in London, the two of them instantly bonding over a shared love for the new age Pop Punk bands of the early 2000s; the aforementioned 182, Bowling for Soup and Sum 41.

“It had been 9 years since I’d last been in a band so, after the 182 gig, I decided to give it another try,” Terry recalls in an exclusive interview for, For The Love of Bands.

“We met up in a pub in Angel and got on brilliantly, and 2 days after meeting we wrote One Last Chance together. Then Jake brought in his lifelong friend Jason Sayers on drums and the band was born.

“Me, I play bass and sing, Jake Leigh plays guitar and sings, then there’s Jason on drums.”

            Terry and Jake initially set out to write songs with that clichéd yet catchy 00’s Pop Punk appeal, which was where the name Cuecliché initially sprang from.

“The name is actually something that’s been stuck in my head since I was 15 and going to band nights at my local town hall. I was moaning that every band sounded the same; cliché then the next cliché, then cue the next cliché: three, two, one, cue cliché,” he says with a wry smile. “And so came the name, Cuecliché.”

            Despite the shared influences, the 3 bandmates quickly realised that they were making music with their very own, very distinctive sound. Okay, you can still hear the reverberations of the catchy riffs that hark back to the early 2000s, as well as those familiar melodies that marked out those new wave bands and made them increasingly popular, only now they are often interrupted by huge guitar solos born of much heavier influences.

“He’s really into his classic rock,” Terry reveals of Jake. “Def Leppard, Bon Jovi and the likes, which explains the excessive amount of guitar solos. Especially on our latest E.P., The Cliché.”

            The release of that first song, One Last Chance, was followed with the E.P., Look at the Pictures, in 2019. All the tracks were home-recorded self-releases, but were quickly streamed over 25,000 times, the band receiving critical acclaim, enhancing an already fast-growing reputation.

            So, what of their brand new release?

            At the back end of 2021, Cuecliché began tracking demos for the new E.P., but a global pandemic interrupted the process. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology however, the band worked together remotely, resulting in more “versions” of every song than their previous releases combined, and resulting in The Cliché, Cuecliché’s best E.P. to date; the band grow organically, building on those earlier tracks, broadening musical horizons. Terry revealed that the four tracks were all finished and recorded in Jake’s childhood bedroom: “his parents let him turn it into a studio of sorts! We make it work, we hope?”

            The Cliché will be released over four months, starting with the track Last Dance on the 18th of August, just before the guys head out on tour. The other tracks of the EP will appear here once released.

“We’ll be playing a few shows to promote this release,” they reveal with a natural air of excitement. “We’re playing Herts Pride in Cassiobury Park, Watford, and then we’re heading to West Street Live in Sheffield, The Shed in Leicester, the Outpost, Liverpool and then London… at the Fiddler’s Elbow.” A sort of homecoming, Terry reveals, as Cuecliché began their live careers at the world famous Fiddler’s Elbow, going on to perform all over the U.K. ever since, including 6 self-organised mini tours. They were scheduled to support The Plain White Ts in 2020, but sadly the pandemic saw that tour cancelled.

            Their live performances are fast-paced, intense affairs, now renowned for the audience’s full-on interaction. “Collectively our goal is to get out there and play these songs as much as we can and get back to work on new music. This will probably be the last ‘E.P.’ we release,” Terry reveals. “From here we will probably go down the route of just releasing singles, just a victim of the times. Individually Jason and Jake are both running their own YouTube channels that are slowly growing a very strong audience,” he adds proudly, highlighting the sense of the family bond the trio so obviously share.

            But, of the new E.P.? Can the guys take us through the tracks?

“Absolutely,” Terry says.“Last Dance,” the track that helps almost conjure the new E.P. into life, – a touch of Sum 41 with an underlying and gratifying early-Green Day energetic rhythm of unforgiving attitude – “is an open goodbye to all the people in life you see for the last time without realising, school friends you swear you’ll keep in touch with but never do, colleagues you lose touch with etc… It’s something I’ve always thought is crazy, that there’s so many people in life I’ve called friend that I may never see again. And I would imagine that kind of thing has happened a lot more without a proper goodbye because of the Pandemic, all those kids who didn’t get their final years in school. College or uni.

“Not The Only One, is an absolutely huge anthemic, uplifting song about friends carrying each other through tough times, whilst Dear You is a song that is part inspired by the film 500 Days of Summer, and was partly a song I wrote to the girl I hoped one day to meet, and between now and writing that song I met someone even better, so that was lucky,” he laughs.

“This Life is a fun song because it’s written in a very different perspective. It’s a song written to try to help encourage people break out of routine and structure, to get more from life and, most importantly, to not give up on life. Both verses have a different melody, which is unusual for us, and in the first verse I sing with a very distorted tone that I’ve never used before.” Terry then reveals that they’ll be releasing each track monthly, “purely to take advantage of release algorithms and to make sure we have lots of new stuff to talk about to keep things interesting rather than drop an E.P. all at once.”

            And what about the artwork: what was the inspiration behind that?

“A lot of the music has big anthemic guitar solos… There was a 5th song intended for this E.P. that had really strong 80’s rock influences throughout so the artwork is loosely inspired by Bon Jovi’s, Slippery When Wet artwork, the faint font over the black background, but then there is also a little known story about how the original artwork for that album was a picture of girls in a car wash with a thick pink border, so the border is added as a subtle nod to this.”

The release schedule for the four tracks will be as follows, and is available on all streaming services:

                                    1.         18/08 – The Last Dance
                                    2.         15/09 – Not The Only One
                                    3.         20/10 – Dear You
                                    4.         17/11 – This Life

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Find The Last Dance on our NEW ROCK 2022 playlist.