New Music on the horizon tonight. The Orchestra (For Now) is a seven-piece band (with strings), together since 2023 and have (or are about to) issue their debut EP, Plan 75. They did a session at BBC 6 Music as part of New Music Fix, broadcast earlier today.
NME are very high on the band at the moment, and May Robbins of the paper has written some stunning recommendations and observations over this relatively new sub-genre currently making the rounds on the London Prog scene and the likes of The Orchestra (For Now).
“Lately, it seems London’s experimental rock scene is locked in a love affair with maximalism. Black Country, New Road have pivoted from the acerbic post-punk of their first album to the sprawling pastoralism of Joanna Newsom or Arcade Fire; Caroline make post-rock as an eight piece with its own complete string section. With their debut EP ‘Plan 75’, The Orchestra (For Now) have distilled this sound into its most essential form: sonically manifesting the neuroses that could only develop from living in a city like London.
Getting their start in cult venues like the Windmill and the George Tavern, The Orchestra (For Now) have become notorious for their hypnotically engaging live show. The band have spent two years gigging around this scene – even playing with Black Midi in their final Windmill gig. All seven members are so familiar with each other that they navigate through swells and troughs of their complex sound with the coordination of a military operation. ‘Plan 75’, as guitarists Bill Bickerstaff and Neil Thompson tell NME, is not only their attempt to “capture a particular moment in the studio”, but a snapshot of their life in contemporary London.
Although most of the band are not from the city, the EP reflects a specific London anxiety that Bickerstaff articulates as intense neurosis, explaining that he and frontman/songwriter Joe Scarisbrick “feel quite anxious about getting older, being left in the dirt. I think in ‘Plan 75’, the neurotic twisting and turning of the songs and the fullness of them was a symptom of that.”
“We are just people living in the here and now, we’re going to write honestly and be honest, musically,” Thompson adds. “And that means writing songs that are about the outrageous rent in London, even if it doesn’t say so explicitly in the lyrics.”
‘Plan 75’ also casts an equally paranoid glare on a world where the internet has become an omnipresent harbinger of austerity-induced hyperoptimisation. Bickerstaff calls this brave new world “such a fast moving ride,” with the lyrics emerging in parallel to “lots of very late, intense conversations about how fucked we were, how we’d missed our stop, so to speak.” Scarisbrick’s tendency to link death and the digital – be it the murder of an OnlyFans model in ‘The Strip’ or capturing casualties on BeReal in ‘Wake Robin’ – is a further reflection of the world young people must now navigate; one where more and more effort is required for ever-diminishing slices of the same pie.
Bickerstaff understands the urge to create in this environment as a double-edged sword. “I think you always feel like you’re chasing your shadow a bit,” he explains. “You always feel like you’re chasing some kind of grander version of you, a version that is bigger than life.” And yet, London is somehow both a source of creative neurosis and also central to the chase itself. When the band decided to move to the city, supposedly in a bid to hit the big time, Thompson admits, “I had no intention of that when I moved here.”
But Bickerstaff cheerfully disagrees: “I did. We want to be big. We want to be remembered.”
– May Robbins, NME – March 20, 2025 issue.
Okay – press play and dive in.
