Album Six, Sheffield Pride and Keeping It Old School | The Sherlocks Interview
Homegrown Sheffield lads, The Sherlocks, quickly solved a couple of mysteries before taking to the mainstage for a mid-afternoon head banger at Tramlines Festival. Northern Exposure’s Gracie Erskine sat down with the band to discuss Sheffield pride, album six and most importantly, the pub.
Gracie: Not long now until your set this afternoon, how are you feeling?
Kiaran: Really pretty fresh today.
Trent: Zen.
Gracie: You’ve been performing at Tramlines for over a decade, before it took home at Hillsborough. How does it feel in 2025 to be performing on the main stage?
Kiaran: It’s good. You’re making us feel old, though, now.
Brandon: I still feel very young. Well, we are pretty young.
Kiaran: We don’t look it now. A bit road worn.
Brandon: Still rocking.
Gracie: Tramlines is heavily a Sheffield flag this weekend; do you feel pride being part of Sheffield’s ever growing culture?
Kiaran: It’s a great city. I’m literally 25 minutes down road. Brandon comes up from Lincoln and, we’re always drinking around here. We’re always in Sheffield.
Brandon: People are sound and all. It’s a great city and it’s nice to see the festival growing and getting bigger.
Gracie: Well, you’ve got your pub, The Jolly Brewer in Lincoln, open now how’s that?
Kiaran: Great! Our team has just won the Sunday League in their first year. What more could you want?
Gracie: So if you had to kill off because you’ve football, music or the pub; which one would it be?
Alex: Horrible question.
Kiaran: Hopefully. We never have to make this decision.
Trent: But is it music or is it the pub?
Alex: Or it could be football?
Kiaran: I mean, for me, it’d be football. I’m not a massive football fan, but Brandon over there is.
Kiaran: Definitely can’t be music. And we spend far too much time in pubs.
Gracie: Your latest album, Everything Must Make Sense!, is your most challenging and variable work yet. Do you feel less pressure now that you’re independent?
Kiaran: That’s a big part of it, being independent. We can sort of get in studio when we want. The whole process is quite a long process of writing tunes and then you finally get in studio, you get them recorded and artwork and all that. Doing it yourself allows you to just do it whenever you want. Pretty soon we’ll start cracking on with album six.
Brandon: I don’t think, I’ve not anyway, ever felt any pressure with any album just because everything we do in studio, we’re always happy with it. It’s never felt like any pressure in terms of putting albums out and stuff like that.
Kiaran: Even when we were signed we were in control of it all.
Gracie: If a label wanted to sign you tomorrow, would you go back to one or keep striving on your own?
Kiaran: Since we’ve left the label, we’ve seemed to have gone strength to strength. We’re happy being independent, so 100% stick to doing that.
Gracie: With the rise of social media and kind of the push to be going viral, do you find it harder to kind of sell the new music and get it out there more?
Kiaran: It’s a changing world, isn’t it? We’re pretty old school, so it’s new to us, but we have fun with it. I mean, we just stick videos of him (all seemingly point to each other) necking pints. That’s basically our way of trying to go viral.
Brandon: We’d just look at each other and go, what can we do that’s mildly amusing and it usually ends up being that.
Gracie: Do you find that that’s a way to kind of keep your integrity within the band?
Kiaran: Us being in a band is the main thing, so we’d never like just start getting too daft. I mean, you’ve got to keep pushing music.
I just feel like back when we started, it felt like everyone was really into music. New bands were getting played on radio a lot more and there were a lot more opportunities and stuff.
But it’s like consume, consume, consume. It’s a clip of song now, not even a full song. Whereas we’ve always prided ourselves on putting a body of work out as an album, start to finish.
Some artists are probably making songs now with TikTok in their head, thinking, yeah, I need to get 15 seconds here so it blows up. But I don’t think that’s the way forward.
Gracie: So album six is definitely staying as an album and not a collection of TikTok samples then?
Kiaran: Definitely.
Gracie: You’ve got your huge homecoming show at Sheffield Steelyard next year; what does that mean to you, and what can we expect?
Kiaran: After playing Don Valley last time, we decided we didn’t want to do the usual venues.
Brandon: I don’t think anyone jas ever played there, so it’s really exciting for us.
Kiaran: It’s a class lineup with Tom A Smith and Skylights. It’s going to be mint.
Whilst the lads bounced back between one another, lighting up at the possibility of a pint, their words and their performance prove that their biggest passion lies within their music. The indie four-piece will take the stage June 27th for their almost sold-out show at Sheffield Steelyard next year, but you can read all about their electric set and the rest of Tramline’s curtain call for 2025 right here.
