Knee Deep In Custard

They walk around with pebbles in their shoes and grins on their faces. Hmmm… let’s say they sound like the memories of our past, a funny walk, or tears falling on the piano. They come from Johannesburg, South Africa, and make music that drifts somewhere between the melancholic and the uncanny, blending live vocals, piano, bass, and electronics in ways that feel both immediate and strangely distant, like noticing a familiar street in the rain and realizing it’s never looked quite the same before. They sometimes hide completely behind thin screens, performing behind shadows, so that the audience sees the flicker of shapes and projections first, and only later do they notice the people themselves, moving behind the veil of light. Some have said it feels like the echo of British occult post-industrial music, like COIL or Drew McDowell, but it’s also unmistakably Custard: intimate, strange, and full of small, human missteps. Notes are sometimes slightly off, pauses are a little too long, and yet it all feels alive, real, like life itself, which is never precise or predictable. Their performances carry the awkwardness of everyday movement, the shuffle of shoes, the tilt of a head, the glance to nowhere but somehow these tiny imperfections create a space that is warm, humorous, and oddly comforting.