Victim of a Casual Thing: An Interview with the Clause
INTERVIEW
By Serenna Zingg
1/19/26
Courtesy of Spotify
For a somewhat drab country, British independent music has long punched above its weight on “pub bangers” playlists. The Arctic Monkeys, sloshing beers around to Franz Ferdinand, Blur and subsequent (if more subdued) Gorillaz dance floor classics; for the length of a decade, the British music scene was engineered for late nights at the pub and stadium tours with the lads. What happens when COVID, Brexit, ever-tightening budgets, and crushing pressure for inauthentic tech-driven marketing slash all four wheels on the proverbial party bus? To risk sounding like a broken record of journalists in every single field and niche, the past few years have coerced a lot of creative fields, and general consumers, towards absurdism to manufacture a shared sense of circumstantial bearings. Perhaps I spend too much time researching artists specifically from the “post-everything” Brixton Windmill scene, but in my experience studying recent trends within British indie music, I’ve noticed a form of post-everything abandon seeping into the architecture, lyricism, and even track production particulars dominating the collective consciousness of scene inspiration at the moment: the propulsive nihilism of post-punk, the tousle of post-rock, and the twee of freak-folk which all cohere into a sound that somehow manages to be both deeply offensive and fundamentally skittish.
Sparse as the scene of British rock bands reclaiming some of their innocence may seem - with many of the bands doing it not quite sticking the landing of the 2010s era they’re trying to replicate - The Clause’s (made up of frontman Pearce Macca, guitarist Liam Deakin, bassist Jonny Fyffe, and drummer Niall Fennell) 2025 debut release Victim of a Casual Thing stands as one of the strongest releases from last year that manages to overhaul the revival of pub-ready British, cinematic independent rock into something with real swagger and genuine replay value.
It’s been a long time coming: the debut album is a culmination of tracks they’ve written and performed together since their high school years, combining the boyish, raw energy of independent rock with the more self-aware polish and ability to self-edit characteristic of artists who have reformed the boundaries and identity of their sound countless times over. This self-restraint in polish and cinematic movement, combined with the leaden, bass-heavy enthusiasm that imbue stadium bands with infectious electricity, is particularly impressive considering their lack of guidance from a label. After getting hot-potatoed from Universal during COVID-19 and temporarily losing the rights to their most popular song, “In My Element,” they returned to their independent roots. It serves as an aspirational story for all independent bands - despite not leaning on the leadership of a label for promotion, Victim of a Casual Thing reached #1 in the independent charts in November of last year - even outperforming Sabrina Carpenter in the UK charts for a time. “We wanted the album to be a journey. I think, like, we do say, you know, we're not scared of trying risks, but I think at times internally, because it was just us four involved in it. You know, because we had no one to ask and go, ‘What do you think about this kind of thing?’ Well, I think it's paid off because it's completely authentic to us. So that's why I wouldn't change anything about it.” shared frontman Pearce Macca.
The commitment to risk and authenticity is most audible in how the album carries itself. Conceived as a journey rather than a highlight reel, Victim of a Casual Thing leans into heartfelt cinematic pacing, allowing songs to breathe, crest, and collapse like scenes rather than standalone indie rock tracks. The first cluster of electric-driven tracks “Nothing’s As It Seems,” “Tell Me What You Want,” and “Element” combine the lovably self-aware bravado of energetic worldbuilding - fully embracing the raucous, absurd nature of trying to build a career in a field that creates emotional polarity (and couldn’t care less about the middle-ground emotional content anyway). Delightfully agitating and clattering guitar-led track “Tell Me What You Want,” while “Element” nails down the rhythmic liquidity that most bands in the scene attempt and few fully achieve. “I mean, personally, like Nile Rodgers is a big inspiration for me guitar-wise; we're massive disco fans and soul fans. Being from Birmingham, we really look up to Mike Skinner from The Streets in the way he portrays his poetic lyrics about growing up in our city,” Pearce and Liam shared of the key influences forming the tonal baseline of the record.
Yet, the potency of the album lies most in its willingness to swing the pendulum toward nostalgia and sentimentality: as brash and braggadocious as the beginning may crash-land (non-derogatory), the more exposed middle leads to wispier tracks such as “Pink Moon” and “Elisha” - they still rock out in their own right, but maintain the innocent youthful energy of their formative early years as a high school band.
“I’d describe some of our tracks as heartfelt,” says Pearce. “I guess every time you do that in an indie rock album, it's a bit of a sonic risk. It definitely had a good amount of variety, you know? I mean, that's always who we've wanted to be. Like, a band that can make you laugh and make you cry in back-to-back songs.” Final track “Don’t Blink” - arguably the album’s most assured synthesis - draws the widescreen confidence of its opening stretch inward, tempering it with nostalgia for youth and naivety until it reads less like a finale than a thesis: a reminder to pause, look back, and register just how far they’ve come.
“I'm mostly proud of it because it was quite a hard write at times, and it was kind of one of the last songs on the album, and we knew we really wanted to end it well,” says Pearce. “I'm proud of not just myself - I'm proud of how we came together as a unit, really, and dug deep to get that song finished. I mean, it really felt like our brains were melting because we were all putting 100% in. You know what I mean? And it all fused into something I'm so pleased with.
This whole kind of abandoned this whole album has just been a product of learning from our own mistakes. We are very optimistic people. I feel like at times, we're constantly always looking forward and never actually looking back, but we haven't quite come to terms with the fact that we've been wanting exactly this since we were ten. You know, our photographer Luke has traveled the country with us, watching us to play a lot, watching us play to ten people, and he still got back in the Van Afghan and went, ‘That was wicked, lads. We’re so proud of it, but it’s not meant to be perfect. You know what I mean? You can really hear the journey. Looking at the lows and the highs and stuff. We're not putting up a disguise about any of it. You can hear from when we start in our 1st track, the progression through to the stage where we were trying to find out who we were and who the band wanted to be. And it all kind of circled around into the album and all the songs on the album. It's like a complete culmination of everything that we've been through.”
“This is good stuff,” I say. “I should pitch an article to Buzzfeed: 10 Inspirational Quotes From The Clause.”
“Wow, that would be a dark day indeed,” Pearce laughs. “I think we’d just disappear forever after that. You have our blessing, though, of course.”
Unfortunately, I could only excavate about five truly inspirational quotes from our conversation - one of them pertaining to the necessity of walking straight out of an Irish pub if they are selling Guinness merchandise and playing music by The Pogues. Of the entirety of the interview - speaking about a British rock album in a Brum accent - that might have been the most hopelessly British statement uttered yet.
Listen to Victim of a Casual Thing
