Liverpool quartet Honey Motel arrive with Motel FM, a six-track EP that feels less like a tidy debut and more like a late-night broadcast beamed straight from the fringes. Raw but refined, chaotic yet cohesive, the release captures a band stepping confidently into their identity, loud where it needs to be, reflective when it matters most.
Produced by Alec Brits (known for work with Clean Cut Kid and Michael Aldag), Motel FM balances polish with pulse. Honey Motel’s guitar-led sound sits somewhere between indie, alt-rock and alt-pop, but it never feels boxed in. Instead, the EP plays like a restless scan across frequencies, distortion colliding with texture, buoyancy undercut by dread.
Opening moments like If You Didn’t Exist shimmer with silky vocals and choppy indie tones, while T.N.A.K. leans into driving intensity and fuzzy, high-octane grit. Elsewhere, Milk reveals a jazz-influenced harmonic sensibility, giving the band room to stretch melodically without losing momentum. It’s a subtle detail, but one that elevates the EP beyond standard guitar-band fare.
The centrepiece and finale, Aphrodite, is where Honey Motel fully unshackle themselves. Psychedelic, punchy, and gleefully unhinged, the track veers from claustrophobic domestic imagery to cosmic absurdity, threading existential dread through surreal humour. Recorded live in a chapel in Wales before being pushed further into rambunctious territory back in Liverpool’s Cabin studio, the song spirals into a freight-train chorus stacked with quadruple-tracked vocals, experimental harmonies and even accordion flourishes. It’s maximalist, chaotic, and completely self-aware, the sound of a band revelling in their own release.
What holds Motel FM together is its emotional undercurrent. Beneath the noise and fuzz sits a thread of vulnerability, songs stitched from boredom, love, quiet dread, and the strange comfort of finding belonging in shared weirdness. Honey Motel aren’t posturing; they’re broadcasting from inside the swamp, inviting listeners to tune in rather than clean up.
Comparisons to Nothing But Thieves or Royel Otis make sense sonically, but Honey Motel’s strength lies in their atmosphere. They understand dynamics, when to let guitars punch and when to let space breathe. It’s a quality likely honed onstage, and the EP retains that live-wire energy without sacrificing detail.
As a debut EP from this quartet lineup, Motel FM feels like a statement of intent. It doesn’t smooth out the edges or pretend to have all the answers. Instead, it revels in contradiction, melodic but abrasive, playful but existential, tight yet unrestrained.
If this is the first official broadcast from Honey Motel as a four-piece, the signal is strong, strange, and impossible to ignore.
