In the five years since ‘Night Network’, The Cribs went through a period of self-reckoning and reflection that could have broken a lot of bands. But on ‘Selling A Vibe’, the Jarmans return replenished and still ready to fight the good fight.

It’s 10pm on a Saturday night and The Cribs are laying waste to a sweaty East London back room for the smallest gig they’ve played in over a decade. Bodies crash into one another gleefully from the front of the venue to the back; the temperature of the building has raised by about ten degrees, and a fan is fist pumping the air, a full sleeve tattoo featuring the likenesses of the three Jarman brothers covering his entire arm. It’s the end of summer 2025, but for a brief moment it could be 2005 again: no beloved indie treasures can still tap into the freewheeling, semi-chaotic spirit of the early days quite like these three. “It’s still second nature to us to be able to do that, we still thrive in those environments,” bassist Gary says post-show, damp from the exertion of a job well done.

In the ways that matter, the outlook of The Cribs has stayed true since even before those wild breakthrough years. Faced with a dead tour van earlier in the morning, they rang around the good musicians of Wakefield, trying various other - as it turns out - knackered vehicles until they found a way to get to the gig. “Doing this show’s been a four van job today, you know?” guitarist Ryan notes. Playing in aid of War Child, we find the band sat in The Shacklewell Arms’ graffiti-scrawled, underground dressing room eating a Greggs in lieu of getting a proper rider, to save the operation any needless money. They’re still the same men we’ve always known; cut The Cribs open and they bleed a DIY-minded outsider spirit that’s grounded them since the off. But they’re also done with being “typecast” as only that.

“It’s a good reputation to have, that you don’t have the airs and graces to feel like you’re above doing things like this,” Gary continues, “but if you do it all the time, you’re essentially putting yourself in a position where you’re not being particularly ambitious, and you’re just retreading old ground.” Two criticisms that certainly couldn’t be levelled at this particular band of brothers.

Now unveiling their ninth studio album - this month’s ‘Selling A Vibe’ - the band have spent the last two decades exploring every facet of their sound, becoming established main stage festival favourites with the rare ability to intertwine nostalgia and a genuine, continued appetite for their new material. Their Steve Albini-produced seventh album ‘24-7 Rock Star Shit’ landed the band their joint-highest ever chart placing; 2020’s ‘Night Network’ scored perhaps their best reviews to date (including a near-perfect 4.5 in DIY’s own pages). As for pushing their own boundaries, new album highlight ‘You’ll Tell Me Anything’ begins with the theatrical vocals of an Italian operatic tenor. “Naturally, I was like, ‘We shouldn’t do that because that’s not us’,” recalls Ryan. “And then I was like, ‘Why the fuck am I thinking like that?’”

But more than just natural evolution and expansion, there’s been some far more profound changes happening in Jarman HQ in the five year gap between their last and ‘Selling A Vibe’. Having grown up with the attitude that earned them that early reputation as 100% committed rock’n’roll lifers - a band that would happily bleed over their microphones nightly and gig 364 days a year - they’ve finally been asking themselves: at what cost? “I’ve always thought that, being a musician, you can’t do it casually. It can’t just be a facet of who you are, you’ve almost got to let it consume you,” says Ryan. “But I just think that you maybe don’t realise to what degree it’s got its claws into you until it’s too late.”

**

“ I’ve always thought that being a musician can’t just be a facet of who you are, you’ve almost got to let it consume you. — Ryan Jarman

‘Selling A Vibe’ is riddled with soaring hooks and the innate pop ear that has always offset The Cribs’ more punk-routed sensibilities. Produced by Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberley, his input marks another new venture for the band - a step into contemporary pop recording following a studio career spent testing all kinds of different techniques. But while the end result is a joy, the songs themselves often wear their struggles audibly.

At the centre sits the Ryan-helmed ‘Looking For The Wrong Guy’ - an atmospheric slow-build that transforms into a cathartic purge: “If you’re looking for me, you’re looking for the wrong guy / I’m just wasting away, watching the time go by”. The track, Ryan explains, “was the only song that I wrote between 2021 and 2024, so that’s indicative of where my head was at the time.” During that time, his partner got sick. Having relentlessly thrown himself into the “unsustainable” lifestyle that he had, somehow, managed to sustain for 15 years, it was the first time that the guitarist took a step back and reassessed his priorities. “A lot of the things that were a big part of the attraction to doing [this career] in the first place - the lifestyle that was a big attraction - all of it is just total bullshit,” he says.

Having grown up adoring bands like Nirvana, the potential catastrophe of devoting their life to music was baked in. “When we were kids, all the bands that we loved and admired and wanted to follow in the footsteps of ultimately all ended in disaster, but that didn’t really matter,” says Gary. “For kids in a small town daydreaming, that was still a totally worthy trade-off. But then the reality of being on the road all the time is really hard. The first tour we ever did, after the first day you wake up and you’re all right because you’ve done gigs before in the past. The second day, you start to feel like, ‘Oh, man, this is intense’. Third day, you think, ‘I can’t live like this, this is too difficult’, but then by the fourth day you’ve found your rhythm. You get used to it, and then you’re used to it for like, ten years. But if you normalise something that was initially a shock to you, it means you’ve become accustomed to something that’s unnatural.”

Having emerged during a time in the industry where burn out was barely even considered, and drugs and booze were just part of the deal, The Cribs fell into the same cycles that have befallen countless bands before them. “Being aware of the cliches, and having the anti-rockist ethos that we have, it’s so ironic to then look back and be like, ‘Fucking hell, I did all those things even though it was something we were actively trying to avoid’,” Ryan says. “I’m not being dramatic but I really don’t remember that much of my twenties, and not because I was black out wasted all the time, but it was just constant flux and constant numbing of the anxiety or stresses of it,” Gary continues. “It felt normal because we were still playing good shows and making good records, so we didn’t feel like we were in any way fucking up. But I don’t think it’s really normal for 15 years of your life to be kind of a blur like that, you know?”

“ When we were kids, all the bands that we loved and admired ultimately ended in disaster. — Gary Jarman

The pause of the pandemic, plus an additional few years of “figuring out where The Cribs ended and where the Jarman brothers began” proved an incredibly necessary reset. Finally feeling the urge to get in the rehearsal room together once more, they found that the process of making ‘Selling A Vibe’ felt suddenly fresh again - a newfound clarity giving them a clean well to draw from, rather than one where their energies had perhaps long been running dry. “Things feel fresh again, which is not something you expect when you’re nine records in,” Ryan notes.

Even the darkness in some of the lyrics, says the guitarist, comes from going through the worst and being able to talk about it from something resembling the rearview mirror. “Obviously there’s a whole load of reasons why I’m glad to be in a better place, but creatively it’s actually a lot more interesting because you’ve processed it and left it behind,” he suggests. “To still be in that situation now, I don’t think it’d be good for the music.”

And the music on The Cribs’ ninth is worth fighting for. On the opening one-two of ‘Dark Luck’ and ‘Selling A Vibe’’s title track, Ryan’s guitar lines capture a niche of bittersweet euphoria that few can do quite as well. Whether on the wryly peppy jangle of ‘Never The Same’ or the Smiths-y melancholia of ‘Self Respect’, the band are immediately recognisable whilst still finding ripe new ground to explore.

The latter track, with its refrain of “self respect will never cash the cheques”, meanwhile, pulls at a thread that started way back when with iconic early single ‘Hey Scenesters!’. If this is the more grown up version - a lyric no doubt informed by a taxing and lengthy period pre-’Night Network’ of fighting for and winning back the rights to their catalogue - then the underlying attitude feels perhaps more pertinent now than ever, when bands are seen as brands and, says Gary, “[music] is seen like a leaderboard now, where the metrics give people almost like a score or a grade.”

The Jarmans are under no illusion that they could have the same success and longevity that they’ve had if they were starting out now. “The DIY way of people making it now, that path is just not really the same anymore. There’s the idea that you can do it through social media, but that’s all self-promotion. Only the peacocks really thrive in those environments; it’s not for the misfits or the awkward, weird people,” says Gary. “There’s no functional underground now, by which I mean a self-sustaining community that you could exist in and not ever pay any attention to what was on the Radio 1 playlist. It would be impossible for a band like us now - a working class band from a small town who operate in that old school way.”

There’s no easy fix, but as always, the resistance lies with the people - creating scenes, doing things in small towns, linking up and making something tangible and real that doesn’t rely on the algorithms to dictate where it goes. “Big tech isn’t a supportive infrastructure, it’s just a profit vessel. It can’t possibly replace a grassroots DIY community,” Gary stresses, as Ryan picks up: “The community was the only thing that gave us hope when we were younger. When we were doing local shows and playing to no one and rehearsing every week - even then, you saw that you might be able to change your life.”

**

“ Only the peacocks really thrive on social media. It’s not for the misfits or the awkward, weird people. — Gary Jarman

The tech giants, the government, and the world at large might be making it increasingly difficult for new bands to follow in their footsteps, but it helps that a band like The Cribs remain to show that actually, sometimes, it can be done. Having spent last summer celebrating the 20th anniversary of still-superlative second record ‘The New Fellas’, they’ve made it through two more decades with their energies replenished and their morals intact. Self respect might not have ever taken them to the stadiums, but it’s helped them outlast most of their peers and served them pretty damn well in the long run.

‘Selling A Vibe’ ends with perhaps the most self-referential song the band have ever penned in ‘Brothers Won’t Break’. With joint, dual vocals, Ryan and Gary sing a theory of everything: “All that our roots did / Was just trip us up / But we’ll keep it from an honest place”. Because really, these brothers, they couldn’t be anything but honest if they tried.

Previously, it was hard to imagine the band ever stopping. “When you’re in a band with your brothers, that’s a relationship you’ve had for life, so you don’t really know where that ends or how that ends?” Gary acknowledges. Perhaps that was part of the problem. But now, having come close to breaking, they’ve come back all the stronger - in it purely for the love of the craft; selling a vibe that’s truer than ever. “These days, every time we finish a record or finish touring, we’re waiting for the feeling to come back that we want to do it again,” says Ryan. “This time it took five years - and it takes as long as it takes - but as long as that feeling comes back, that’s all that matters.”

‘Selling A Vibe’ is out 9th January via Play It Again Sam.

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