Ones To Watch: Peace

“I remember thinking, ‘Why aren’t I in a band called Peace?’” Harrison Koisser snorts. “It sounded an awesome idea.”
Bored in the suburban Birmingham office he worked in (he’s now a “full-time scrounger”), a photograph celebrating the end of World War Two inspired Harrison to daydream about setting peace signs to music.
Alongside his brother Samuel, Harrison recruited Douglas Castle and Dominic Boyce (“proper hippies, with cloaks, bare feet and headscarves”) to create the rush of guitars and happy-pills melodies that characterise Peace’s songs.

Dip-dyed t-shirts, their huge peace symbol logo, and sentences suffixed with “cool, man” illustrate Peace’s “love of mother earth”, yet their songs betray some altogether different influences.
After months of partying with techno-heads Joe And Will Ask, Harrison began exploring the idea of replicating the heavy electronics that soundtracked his weekends, with guitars. “We’re technically a guitar band, but it doesn’t always sound that way; I like guitars that don’t sound like guitars,” he explains.
Early release ‘Bblood’ prompted comparisons to Foals, yet it’s the ecstatic crescendo rather than its hi-octane guitar lines, that best illustrate Peace’s sound.
“That comparison isn’t relevant,” Samuel says. “‘Bblood’ was the first thing we wrote, it’s a small part of us.”
Indeed, Peace are carving a covetable aesthetic in the vein of Harrison’s beloved Creation Records. Landing somewhere between acid house and Aztec Camera, their whirlpool of syrupy melodies, muscular rhythms and miasmic guitars is tied together by a desire to bend their instruments’ capacity, to surprise people.
“We want to make people feel awesome when they hear us and say, ‘What the fuck just happened to me?’”
They’re leaving an increasing number of people asking themselves that very question. Via 3,000 capacity shows with The Twang (better than it sounds, honest), Peace are beginning to realise their vision.

‘Follow Baby’ is released on 23rd April.