We’ve covered Hampshire’s Exam Season a few times over the past few years. The band, which consists of Ed Watson (guitar/vocals), Jack Laurilla (guitar), Louis Kneale (bass) and Toby Matthews (drums), put out their debut release Mostly Homely back in 2018, a record we described as “a delightfully British record addressing an unquestionably global malaise.”
A single as part of Art Is Hard‘s Pin Pal Club followed, and then finally 2018 EP smol, a release that found nostalgia charged with a keener sense of loss that captured the key components of the Exam Season style—the playful reminiscing hiding a deeper look back into the past, the ache of knowing that the best things go away with time, and so often cannot return.
There’s been a period of silence in the interim, but now Exam Season are back with a brand new single, ‘Your Car’. The melancholic ache of previous releases is still present, but the track deviates from previous releases in its overt confrontation of grief. For death is placed at the forefront of the track, faced head on with a disarming simplicity. “God damn I wish I knew you mum / This is kinda your song,” Watson sings. “You explained to me what cancer was in a Peugeot 106 / I don’t remember much else from age ten but that detail fucking sticks.”
The track could be taken as central to the Exam Season oeuvre. The key that explains the rest of the songs, the prototype from which everything else branches out. An important moment in the band’s life, a benchmark from which to build and hone their style—blending earnest emotion, nostalgic visions and an eye for humour in even the most difficult of places.
I loved our trips to Fleet Service Station,
I’m only half joking when I say it was our favourite holiday destination,
I saw a t-shirt there today that had “legalise dreams” written on the front,
At first I laughed out loud, then thought that’s relatable as fuck.‘cause,
Every night you turn up in my dreams,
But next morning I forget everything,
I just wish I didn’t have to create,
My picture of you with someone else’s paint.
