The Jungle is about to be massive

It’s not every day we get excited about a new girlband – it’s more like every two to three days – but new RCA four-piece Neon Jungle are just a little bit special.

They are (left to right in the picture above) Jess, Asami, Shereen and Amira, they’re from various parts of the UK, and the experience of being in a room with them feels a bit like what people always used to bang on about when they described being taken hostage by the Spice Girls. In a nutshell, they are ‘quite a handful’ but also ‘quite good’.

You may recognise them from the ‘Here’s your next favourite girlband’ post we published in April, which included this Vine of the band performing at a Sony pissup.

That chap in the red cap doesn’t look very impressed, does he? Well that chap in the red cap is a fuckwit because Neon Jungle are AMAZING X100, and their first single, ‘Trouble’, is one of the smartest and most unusual debut singles in recent girlband history.

It’s written and produced by two Popjustice favourites Anita Blay (ie CocknBullKid) and Ben Berry (ie Fear Of Tigers) and like the recent Big Song from Megan & Liz it’s not exactly unlike Icona Pop’s ‘I Love It’. (We think a lot of songs this year will use that tune as a jumping-off point.) But rather than being a cupcakes-and-rainbows version of ‘I Love it’ softened up for a major label girlband, the lyrics, production and overall hysteria of the tune feel even harder. It’s fresh and fiercely electronic without being ‘EDM’, with a chorus of “I don’t look for trouble but trouble looks for me, and it’s been waiting around corners since I was 17″. It’s basically mental.

• There’s rapping!
• There’s shouting!
• There’s swearing!
• There’s banging!

Here’s another clip of them doing it live, at last month’s Future Hits Live event.

“Hey hey” indeed.

Want to see Neon Jungle moving around a bit more? Here they are in the studio.

The best thing about Neon Jungle is that they don’t feel like the sort of band who’ve been invented as an easy copy of something that’s already in the charts, but nor do they seem like  a straightforward reaction against what’s out there.

Obviously they’re stage-managed to a certain degree – the best girlbands always are – and ‘Trouble’ is about as subtle as Christopher Maloney in a spraytan booth when it comes to positioning them as the sort of girlband your parents might be a bit iffy about, but being with them and listening to their music and seeing them dick around on Twitter and Instagram it all feels quite instinctive and spontaneous, meaning that the band feels fun and reckless in a way Little Mix never will.

ALSO: There’s no endless dicking around with ‘limited releases’ and ‘buzz singles’ and all that sort of endless balls-free, fence-sitting tastemaking shit that bands like WooWoos or Kitchen Party or whatever they’re calling themselves today get bogged down with. Just a day one, straight-out-of-the-traps, like-it-or-fuck-off pop banger.

Basically we love this band and their music is really good. THE END.

Further reading

» Neon Jungle on Soundcloud (there’s nothing there yet)
» Neon Jungle’s official site (there’s nothing there yet)
» Neon Jungle’s Twitter
» Neon Jungle on YouTube (there’s nothing there yet)
» Neon Jungle on Facebook (there’s nothing there yet)
» Jess on Twitter
» Asami on Twitter
» Shereen on Twitter
» Amira on Twitter

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