Wasps Vs Humans: Cork-based couple buzzing to be releasing new album
Wasps vs Humans: Carl Plover and Linda Plover are doing a series of live gigs and releasing an album.
From afar, the Cork duo Wasps Vs Humans don’t seem too hard to figure out. What once was the solo project of Lincoln-born punk poet Carl Antony Plover, soon became the raucous sonic partnership made up of himself and Linda Plover, a captivatingly nonconformist couple living and working out of Carrigaline.
Since the late Noughties, Wasps Vs Humans – as either Carl or both Carl and Linda – has consistently created reliably confrontational, cheeky and kinetic tracks, as if their sole plan while on this earth is to ask the questions no one else would dare.
Indeed, the Plovers, operating in a world where even Ed Sheeran’s famously apolitical art has been politicised, do not so much play music as they deploy it. Which, for a suite of reasons, feels like they’re part of something deeper.
This is likely due to the very nature of Carl and Linda themselves. Carl, a veteran of the avant-garde post-punk scene, was in the critically acclaimed 4,000,000 Telephones, a group that earned the coveted approval of BBC Radio 1’s John Peel. Back then, he opened for the likes of John Cooper Clarke and famously delivered a nerve-shredding opening set for Mark E Smith’s The Fall.
“We had our five minutes,” he smiles. “But I’ve always had a love of words, and anything with an experimental edge. My mother was a poet and she introduced me to the likes of Dylan Thomas and Leonard Cohen… That said, I’ve also always thought that reading words off the page can be difficult. I really believe they should be performed to really feel every word.”
Linda, a former music executive who joined the band in 2024, views the world through a similar lens – all the more so following a 2019 thyroid surgery which resulted in a years-long effort to retrieve her voice. “It took years to heal,” Carl says. “So that was a real worry for her. But, it did come back, and powerfully too. You can hear it beautifully on the new album.”
On October 2, Wasps Vs Humans will release their second album, with the kind of cheery fatalism that has become their signature. Born of two years of relentless gigging, the tracklist spans a slew of punchy, anti-authoritarian rhetoric, taking jabs at several of the world’s failing systems in a piece that is also something of a great time. Take, for example, God Is Not On Trump’s Side in which the Plovers combine a state-of-the-nation rallying cry with a pointed jab at the US president.
“That was inspired by that when he shared a picture of himself as Jesus,” he smiles. “But with this record, as with all of our records, we’re looking at things externally with a kind of an emotional reaction to it. They’re not ‘I love you, you love me’ kind of songs, but they’re not preachy either. They have their messages, and are full of energy… but we also have fun.”
This is despite the financial burden of creating a record today. “It’s difficult,” he says, plainly. “I believe really strongly in the power of creativity, which is getting harder to set time away to do as everything gets more expensive. To create the record we really wanted, we gigged for two years and put every piece of money we made from them into it. But, that’s the risk. The reality is that it’s very difficult to be a poet on this kind of level, because you have to think about the economic benefits.”
Around the October release, the band is preparing for a string of live performances, including an intimate iteration at Dublin’s Spindizzy Records, and an official launch in the Crane Lane in Cork. For fans on the fence about attending, it’s worth noting that a Wasps Vs Humans gig – with its thumping drums and roaring finishes – feels less a rendition and more like a protest.
A different experience every time, theirs is exactly the kind of art many would argue that the world needs now more than ever. If anything, for the escapism alone.
“We need to escape for an hour,” he says. “And this is where the arts have an important role to play. Besides that, we have a habit of creating catchy melodies, and perform with an enthusiasm that we’ve been told is infectious. I think we can all agree that there's too much misery going on… so it’s about time we had some fun.”
- Wasps Vs Humans first-ever vinyl release, comes out October 2, with a launch the following day, Saturday Oct 3, at 4pm in Crane Lane, Cork. Tickets for the free event are available via Eventbrite. Other upcoming appearances include Fri Oct 9, Thomas House, Dublin, as special guests to Jinx Lennon; and Fri Oct 23, Cleere's Theatre, Kilkenny
