Aerial Salad return with new EP

Photo credit: Chris Bethell

Manchester’s latest upstarts Aerial Salad quickly follow last album R.O.I. (reviewed here) with a five song blast that lives up to the sound they graced us with last year, now including a very rare love song from the boisterous manc funk punk brothers. Read on…

Following on from last years acclaimed R.O.I. album, Manchester’s favourite sons Aerial
Salad are set to return to the fray with a brand new 5-track EP titled Roi de l’herb to be
released June 27th on 12” vinyl and digital via Venn Records.

Having released their Dirt Mall album during lockdown, which was a pretty grim time to put an album out, the release still eventually opened up some exciting doors for the band and captured Aerial Salad at their most Aerial Salad; loud, brash, silly and emotive. This led swiftly to 2024’s R.O.I. album that marked a real evolution in the band’s sound and songwriting.

“R.O.I. is a concept album but rather than being about a band, it’s from the perspective of an individual pushed to the brink of insanity by the ever-present quest from commercial
success,” explains singer and guitarist Jamie Munro. “The idea came from my job; I’ve been working in the tech industry in ‘sales’. ‘Return on investment’ was probably my most uttered phrase for a few years, I was sick of it, sick of having no positive impact on the world and sick of the tech bro, double espresso, thirsty thursdays, work hard – playhard bollocks culture that comes with it. R.O.I. is me saying ‘know what, you can actually earn a lot of money in life, even without the fallacy of educational infostructure and financial privilege, however, it comes at a cost of your soul, time and energy. R.O.I. is called such because it’s in the opposite pursuit, it’s not about a return on a financial investment, it’s about doing something with your life that’s enjoyable.”

This brings us crashing into 2025, no longer in the same line of spirit destroying work, with some seriously exciting gigs on the horizon, Aerial Salad wanted to kick off the next era of
the band with a short, fast and hard EP and have served up 5 absolute bangers that sit somewhere between Dirt Mall and R.O.I. Listeners get their initial flavour of the EP this week with the track L.A. which finds Aerial Salad in a rare romantic mood.

“We’ve not done a love song in time, classic bit of love song lyrics about wearing your partners skin and crawling inside their hearts,” laughs Jamie. “We’ve (very loosely) called
ourselves a ‘Madchester punk band’ (because we like the Mondays and the Roses as much as we like Title Fight and Shame) and this is a prime example of that combination of styles. We’ve been a band for a similar amount of time for High Vis, I’m a massive fan, I feel like in terms of Punk/Hardcore/Baggy crossover, they’re The Smiths, profound and jawdropping, we’re like the Happy Mondays, chaotic and silly. The video was made to be surreal – the song is a frantic expression of the surreal nature of some of humanities most powerful emotions. The idea of the bloodied-up running is to visualise the lyric “I could crawl inside your beating heart.”

The EP is called Roi de l’herb because of the track King Of The Grass: “We tour and play a lot in France, we’ve played most of our “best” gigs in France, so out of curiosity I wanted to see if the title would translate well, naturally, when the translation contained both “ROI” and l’herbe” – I though, fuck it, that’s about as spot on a title for this EP as we can possibly muster.” King of The Grass is about the band’s bassist Mike Wimbo who works for Rochdale council on the greens team, which means he spends his life in the pouring rain chopping down overgrown hedges and mowing lawns. Elsewhere on the EP, Inject Your Blood is another romantic love song inspired by the TV series True Blood (“I’d inject your blood, into mine just to feel you close”), Wires rages against the world of AI and GPT, whilst the EP’s opening track My Girl is a chaotic, high energy catchy punk song, nothing profound, nothing complicated. It’s a punk song as god intended, a few chords and a load of shouting. “The EP is like the teaser for what’s next,” summarises Jamie. “The overall hook for this EP is one of hope, that by sticking to what you believe in you can do anything.”

Catch Aerial Salad live at the following dates in 2025:

07/05/25 LYON – LE TROKSON
09/05/25 SANT FELIU DE GUIXOLS – ATZAVARA CLUB
10/05/25 BARCELONA – DESKOMUNALCOOP
11/05/25 GRANOLLERS – MINI BEAT FEST
12/05/25 MADRID – THE GODFATHER
13/05/25 TOLOSA – BONBERENEA
15/05/25 SEIGNOSSE – LE BLACK FLAG
16/05/25 PERIGUEUX – LE MOULIN DE ROUSSEAU
17/05/25 MONTAIGU – FURY DANCE
18/05/25 RENNES – TY ANNA
UK TOUR (TKTS ON SALE FRIDAY 11th APRIL 10AM)
21/06/25 GLASGOW – THE GARAGE
22/06/25 NEWCASTLE – CLUNY 2

24/06/25 BIRMINGHAM – SUNFLOWER LOUNGE
25/06/25 LONDON – THE SOCIAL
27/06/25 MANCHESTER – SOUP
28/06/25 SHEFFIELD – CORPORATION
FESTIVALS
6/08/25-10/08/25 BOOMTOWN FESTIVAL
31/07/20-03/08/24 Y-NOT FESTIVAL

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