Legss: Step into the Unreal
Ned Green and Max Oliver talk the making of their debut album, ‘Unreal’.
Photo: Jacob Ray
The first sound on Legss’ debut album, Unreal, is almost a whisper. Subtle guitar and piano notes drift beneath Ned Green’s understated vocals, the air taut with restraint. Gradually, heavier chords push in, dismantling any preconceived expectations. The tempo shifts into a runaway guitar melody, tethered by Jake Martin’s propulsive bass and strings that waver uneasily between lilting beauty and pained screech. By the time Louis Grace’s drums seize control in the closing movement, every element collides in a dense crescendo, flooding the quiet until no silence remains.
As an opener, Broadcast declares Unreal’s intent outright: a constant push and pull between delicacy and abrasion, beauty pitched against brutality, clarity dissolving into distortion, and the real sliding into the unreal.
Since forming in London in 2018, Legss have thrived on disorientation. Twisting away from convention and dragging guitar-based rock into murky yet theatrical territories, Legss’ sound is built on contradictions: explosive yet composed, cerebral yet visceral, unconventional yet unshakably human. Unreal marks a step forward. Where their earlier work revelled in rough, left-field experimentation, their debut album embraces sweeping movements and lush melodies – a move towards accessibility without shedding the unpredictability and bite that has always defined them.
“With Fester, the previous EP, I think we just kind of changed our minds about trying to make everything disconcerting or oblique,” guitarist Max Oliver said. “We love music like that, but we have always loved things that are a bit more lush and melodic. That was something we tried on that EP and realised that actually we were capable of doing. So, we were kind of already in that headspace of ‘let’s see where we can take this’.”
“It was a conscious thing that we spoke about,” vocalist Ned Green added. “But I’d also say it was a natural evolution, something that we felt genuinely compelled to do. I think for the first couple of EPs, in our minds, we were writing accessible music. But I just think we’d been a band for less time. We’ve had more time to explore what each of us all like, to let that sort of naturally embed into us and learn how to do it.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Legss’ writing process has always been insular, focused on listening and responding to one another rather than worrying about outside expectations. “I think the only people we consider when writing would be each other,” Oliver explained. “We’re just jamming completely from scratch in the room. It’s about listening to each other and seeing how we’re going to respond to what each other is doing. Are we doing things that are interesting and exciting each other? And if we’re happy, then that’s all that matters.”
This approach lets Legss’ songs sprawl, fracture and collide, unfolding in undulating waves as opposed to tidy verse-chorus patterns. “Even thinking back to a lot of our previous work, I think we’ve always written songs with a clear idea of progression,” Oliver continued. “Before it was a staccato, rough, aggressive approach, but I think we’ve always liked these parts that meander to each other. We do revel a little bit in that long, epic feeling – the waves of emotion that a piece of music like that can give you.”
Tracks like Broadcast, Eversince and Bit Rot embody that instinct to sculpt movement. Each track is made up of two or three distinct sections, stitched together in ways that feel both natural and strange. Eversince opens with a fragile piano melody before blooming into a warm bed of strings, guitar and piano. A quiet interlude of vocals and keys pulls it back into intimacy before swelling again into lush expanses, its beauty offset by jagged guitars. Bit Rot, by contrast, begins with the low plod of bass and uneasy guitars, its propulsion tactile and unruly – a darker counterweight to the elegance of Eversince.
These multi-part tracks are where Legss’ music thrives. “We always have been really interested in dynamics and pushing those as far as we can,” Green said. “In a place where it feels contrasting to the nature of it, that’s when it feels most logical to us.” It’s music that collides with itself, clashing in ways that can be jarring but always exciting.
Those dynamics extend beyond the music itself. At the heart of Unreal lies an exploration of communication, its inevitable failures, and the slippery sense of unreality in everyday life. Zooming in and out on those feelings, the band draws connections between the macro and micro. On one hand, they’re thinking about post-truth politics and government doublespeak; on the other, the awkward fallout of an argument with a friend or the fumbling attempt to explain something to a coworker. “Right now, in our contemporary culture, we are in a really interesting, unique place where means of communication are being diversified, globalised and changed at such a rapid degree that our intimate, everyday, human interactions are feeling slightly unreal,” Green said.
Social observation has always sat at the centre of Legss’ writing. On Sleepers Awake, these impulses become razor-sharp commentary on social posturing and performance. Lines like: “As I step onto the bus, I thank the driver loudly / Loud enough for the bottom deck to hear how grateful I am” skew the small gestures of politeness that double as performances of virtue. Elsewhere, 909 builds a neurotic character hooked on talk radio and spiralling into madness due to the banality of nine-to-five life: “I leave the house in this fiction, act like my actions are scripted.”
Somewhat rooted in real-life examples, this interplay between observation and invention gives the songs their charge – and perhaps that’s where the unreal truly lies. By nudging the ordinary until it tips into the extraordinary, Legss reveal the uncanny in the everyday. “It’s the extraordinary, because extraordinary is also just the ordinary, but slightly extra,” Green explained. “Unreal examines those prefixes to words that just completely flip the meaning: the disquiet, the disconcerting, the extraordinary. It’s things that we recognise and understand, but with subtle changes to make you question how real they are.”
Yet, beyond these lyrical and theatrical dynamics, Unreal is also about pacing. Instrumental tracks like Silo and Fugue act as moments of respite, deliberate spaces for listeners to breathe between the record’s heavier blows. “We’re not just putting a bunch of songs together,” Green said. “We’ve thought about the album as a whole, and when we feel musically you needed moments of reprise and moments of decompression. If you’re not thinking about an album as a piece of work in which it has to exist entirely, like a painting on a canvas, then you’re doing it all wrong.”
Since Legss usually write music before lyrics, songs often exist in instrumental form first. As a result, the question isn’t “What words should go here?”, but “Is the music complete enough on its own?”. In the case of Fugue, lyrics were written and then stripped away, leaving a composition that operates both as a musical fugue and a psychological one – melodies circling and swirling in a blurred state of reflection. As Oliver put it, “It’s almost the quiet after the storm. You’ve had this insane movement for 45 minutes, where you’re going here, there, and everywhere, and then it just kind of calms out, like the crash is over. It’s the aftermath of everything, and it’s almost a musical continuation of that unreality. You’re not quite sure exactly what you’ve experienced, what everything means, but you’ve got the ghost of the album continuing onwards for a final couple of minutes before it bleeds out.”
If Unreal is a storm, it’s also a turning point – the place where the clouds begin to shift, where what comes next is uncertain but inevitable. For Oliver, it feels like the culmination of something: “It does kind of feel like the closing of the beginning of Legss, and it’s been a very long beginning. We wanted it to be the total culmination of all of the previous work, taking everything to the maximum place where we can take it. But saying that, I think our songwriting developed massively, and we’re still constantly learning as musicians and individuals and as artists. A lot of the things we’ve only just started picking up on now will definitely be taken on to whatever we do next. So, it’s a closing of one door and an opening of another simultaneously.”
In that sense, Unreal doesn’t resolve. Its aftermath is not calm but another kind of tension: a reshaping that refuses to settle, a clearing of air for whatever follows. Both conclusion and introduction, it’s an album that crashes and calms, only to circle back on itself like Fugue. Just as the real and unreal resist fixed states, Legss remain suspended between culmination and becoming – restless, searching and unwilling to settle for anything less than exactly what they envision.
Unreal is out now.