There’s a song on Selling a Vibe, the new album by the Cribs, called Brothers Won’t Break, which is a heartfelt fraternal pact between the guitarist and vocalist Ryan Jarman, his twin, the bassist and vocalist Gary, and their younger brother, the drummer Ross. Their band has been a lifetime’s work: when they formed in Wakefield in 2001, the twins were 20 and Ross was 16. By the time they released their self-titled debut album in 2004 they were pitched into the post-Strokes, Libertines-era frenzy of British indie music, their trajectory one of constant recording, touring and wild wish fulfilment.
Steve Albini, Edwyn Collins and Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos produced their albums, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo guested on 2007’s Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever and Ryan would stay at Courtney Love’s house in Los Angeles. Most astonishing in their curious indie trophy cabinet, the Smiths’ guitarist Johnny Marr joined the band in 2008, staying until 2011.
Sitting in a glassy Shoreditch office, the Cribs are still the model of a perfect indie trio, charisma and cheekbones undimmed in the five years since their previous album, Night Network. They are clear, however, as they look back over their career, there has been a cost — one they willingly “priced in”, Gary says, but one that has forced a collective re-evaluation of their path.
Johnny Marr joined the band in 2008, staying until 2011
ALAMY
There is only a brief window when they are together in one time zone. Gary lives with his wife, Joanna Bolme — formerly one of Stephen Malkmus’s post-Pavement band the Jicks — in Portland, Oregon. Ryan is in New York with his girlfriend, the musician Jen Turner of Here We Go Magic, and Ross lives in Wakefield with his wife and family.
“For the first 20 years of our lives we were the Jarman Brothers but then for the next 20 years we were the Cribs,” Gary says. “It was the same three people but we were only ever hanging out to make music and the only thing anyone in the public knew of us was under this collective name. That almost gave me a strange kind of anxiety — is that prior relationship completely eroded?”
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“What happened to the Jarman Brothers? Where did they go?” Ryan asks.
Selling a Vibe answers that with bright clarity, brilliantly pushing at the limits of what it means to be the Cribs while drilling down into their core values: family, communication and killer tunes. It was recorded with Patrick Wimberly of Chairlift, a musician and producer who has worked with Beyoncé, Blood Orange and Lil Yachty.
“We worked with him because we thought it would take us outside of our comfort zone,” Ryan says. “Our default setting would always be to do stuff in a way that reflects our punk roots but I don’t want to end up going to my default setting.”
Gary, his moustache and fine leather jacket giving him the air of a rock’n’roll airman, points out the influences of Nineties R&B on Self-Respect, the “operatic element” on You’ll Tell Me Anything and the soulfulness of Brothers Won’t Break. It’s a bold midlife resurgence with none of the crises.
Yet the path towards Selling a Vibe has not been simple. In 2017 the band hit what Gary calls “an existential moment” when they discovered they didn’t own their early records. Forged in righteous indie DIY ethics, they were forced to turn to lawyers and accountants, launching a campaign to regain their work. Had they not managed to sort it out, Gary says, they would have been “too demoralised” to keep going.
The album Night Network was the dynamic result of that vindication, but that was truncated by the pandemic: between business and enforced leisure it was time for a valuable stocktaking. “Back in the day it was all about maintaining momentum and you didn’t realise how relentless it was,” Gary says. “It was only when we had this self-enforced pause — when we started trying to reclaim the rights to the back catalogue — that we realised how abnormal and unhealthy that was.”
The Cribs in 2005
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Ryan also had “a complete and utter lifestyle shift” when his partner became sick. “I had no bandwidth to think about anything else,” he says. “When I got into a position where I didn’t have to be in New York the entire time, going off to write or to do the band felt like a real pleasure again as opposed to something I was so used to doing. Starting with this new record, this feels like a completely new phase because my brain is rewired.”
The Cribs use the words “romance” and “idealism” a lot, Gary recognising that in the early days those were the elements that would push them to “play to 60 people in Stoke on three hours’ sleep”. He says they gave it their all while growing up. “As working-class kids in a small town in the north, if you had the desire to be a musician there were no half measures because the opportunities were so limited — you had to make and build those opportunities yourself.
“You would find a place that would let you play. You would find like-minded people who had equipment you didn’t have, like a PA or a van. Somebody might print posters for you. It was necessary to have that community. Everyone had to work really hard and build the infrastructure to allow you to be able to do any of it.”
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Yet they are not overly nostalgic for the early 2000s when “the crazier stuff got, the more it worked. People liked that.” Ryan became famous for injuring himself, not least when he pierced a kidney while sliding across a table of glassware at the NME awards in 2006, a horrific incident later repackaged by the press as a rock’n’roll jape.
There is now more conversation around the music industry’s duty of care to its artists. Did Ryan wish people had looked out for him more? “People try to do that but you don’t hear it,” he says wisely. “I remember Courtney Love trying to have a discussion with me about it once, and coming from Courtney it seemed ridiculous, you know what I mean? Everyone always thinks they are different, though, because it’s me”.
Having made it through, though, they are philosophical. “Look, the fact that Ryan can tell an anecdote about living in Courtney’s pool house and getting a pep talk — if we’d have known that at 15, that would have just been crazy,” Gary says.
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Yet they still remember most fondly the time just after their first album when they decided they would play for beer and fuel anywhere in the country, putting their contact details on the Wild West forum-era internet. “As kids from a small town we knew that if a band came to your small town, you really valued it. There was something really pure about that connection.”
Selling a Vibe is the work of a band still dedicated to that connection, only this time with the weight of precious experience behind them. They admit it has been “a rough period” but as Gary says: “The liberty and the perspective it gave us, it just made it so everything is so much more fun now.” Where did the Jarman brothers go? Exactly where they needed to be.
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Selling a Vibe is out now