‘Young artists are terrified of putting music out’: Jack Cochrane of The Snuts on Millennials, his schoolmate Lewis Capaldi, and how TikTok breeds fear

Jack Cochrane has finally reached news-cycle overload. “You keep getting hit with murder, genocide and bad politicians,” The Snuts’ singer admits, motor-mouthing away in the corner of a Soho bar. “There’s so much news and it’s all so s*** all the time that you almost have to forcibly become ignorant.”

This isn’t coming from your average indie rock knucklehead, media-trained to shrug off questions of politics with the classic don’t-know-enough-to-comment defence. Indeed, after 2021’s debut album W.L. catapulted this whirlwind West Lothian four-piece to instant fame, topping the album chart seemingly from nowhere, The Snuts raced to the barricades. Throwing their debut’s political caution to the wind – and expanding their gritty guitar rock to take in garage punk, funk and cosmic electronica – in 2022 they released a fiercely political second album, Burn the Empire. It raged from the rooftops about government lies and oppression, entitled Eton elites, bloodsucking corporations and the numerous evils of social media. “We believe in 2022 there is no place for fascism or oppression of any kind”, Cochrane told Radio X, “and we must burn the empire that represents it.”

Today – gently spoken, tumble-haired and bearing the blissed-out glaze of the father of a five-month-old away from home for a couple of nights – Cochrane has clearly snuffed his Molotov’s fuse for now. “This record was a nice breath of fresh air away from [that],” he says of The Snuts’ third album Millennials. “When we were making [Burn the Empire], everyone was so frustrated, and that was just what was off the tip of everybody’s tongue – the state of the world, geopolitical [issues]. It was great making that record and touring it but I think we exhausted ourselves.”

As we enter an election year, the UK government’s Trumpian tactic of desensitising the populace into resigned docility by sheer volume of falsehood and wrongdoing seems to have worked on Cochrane. “We’re more accepting of it,” he argues, a rock’n’roll Braveheart becalmed but still seething. “It’s not a shock for us, this blatant lying. Everybody’s just trying to keep their s*** together, so [politicians] get away with probably more corruption than ever before.”

Instead, Millennials draws together snapshots and semi-fictional dramatisations from the lives of the 29-year-old Cochrane, his friends and bandmates – guitarist Joe McGillveray, bassist Callum Wilson, and drummer Jordan Mackay – to create an illuminative collage of millennial life in 2024. Recent single “NPC” throws back to Cochrane as a dope-smoking 16-year-old, overwhelmed by the pressures of the technological age and preferring life as a rudimentary video game non-player character to whatever adulthood might hold for him. “Wunderkind” rejoins him a few years later, now an “overstressed… unimpressive, frankly depressed deadbeat millennial” dating in Wetherspoons. “YoYo” and “Deep Diving” tackle the mental health epidemic sweeping The Snuts’ generation through the eyes of protagonists who are “smiling on the surface” but “drowning in my feels”.

“Everybody’s very distracted and struggling to find their path and also to find any contentment with what they actually have,” he says. “There’s so much ‘I need to consume more, I need to have more, I need to feel happier’ all the time. It’s a confusing place.”

Cochrane cites the swift changes in how millennials like himself have received their information and entertainment as one root cause of their bewilderment. “We can remember the birth of the internet, the birth of the mobile, and then we watched it skyrocket,” he says. And he thinks that rocketing rents and house prices, job insecurity, student debt and the cost-of-living crisis have hardwired struggle into millennial and Gen Z existence for life. Even for the semi-loaded.

“You see it across the board in society in general, but especially celebrity culture. Those are the ones shouting the loudest about how tough things are,” he says. “I thought things would be much easier if you were rich.”

Such themes might suggest that Millennials would be a gloom-ridden soundtrack to regretfully cancelling Netflix and swearing off avocado toast. Not so. “Nova Star” is an explosive coming-of-age tune, brimming with wild ambition. “Millionaires” argues that simply being alive makes us as rich as any recipient of a dodgy PPE contract. “Gloria” pinpoints the effervescent joys in meeting that special someone while fighting them for a TV on Black Friday. And the whole thing fizzes along in sub-three-minute bursts imbued with electro-pop mania.

“For us it’s always been a competition with ourselves, can we do something that we’ve never done before?” Cochrane explains. “Pop’s got this whole different thing now – it’s not a thing to be scared of.”

The record also bristles with emancipation. When The Snuts insisted that their major label Parlophone should downplay the promotion of Burn the Empire so as not to rinse their devoted fanbase during a cost-of-living crisis, it emphasised the cracks in this ill-fitting relationship that had been widening since they first signed in 2018.

We made this whole protest album… and then we were getting into the boardroom with [Parlophone] and they’re going, ‘How do we make as much money off this idea as possible?’ We’re like, ‘Are we crossing the hypocrite line here?’

“Burn the Empire was this whole protest album,” Cochrane says. “We’re going against corporations and big societal issues that we’re passionate about, and then we were getting into the boardroom with them and they’re going, ‘How do we make as much money off this idea as possible?’ We’re like, ‘Are we [crossing] the hypocrite line here?’”

Though the band were supported creatively at Parlophone, The Snuts had been increasingly uncomfortable with recent shifts in the major label system. “The music stopped being the thing that was your selling point,” Cochrane says. “It was always super personality based. ‘How can we enhance your personality as an artist?’ rather than ‘how can we enhance you as an artist?’ We were just like, ‘This is getting too dark.’”

When their contract came up for renewal, The Snuts decided not to re-sign. Instead, Millennials is released on the band’s own label Happy Artist Records, founded with the intention of supporting their acts in all aspects of their art. “Artists are super unhappy right now,” Cochrane says. “Young artists I speak to, they’re terrified of putting their music out for the thought of it getting 13 likes on TikTok, and the person they really want to be like is everywhere.” Much of this malaise, he believes, comes from being a commodity caught in a conveyor belt system. “It’s one-size-fits-all promotion and one-size-fits-all creation and it’s a mess. It’s like rats in a box now, man, everybody’s eating each other.”

The Snuts might seem unlikely label honchos, having always been a bit Liz Truss with their finances. “We’ve nearly been bankrupt so much,” Cochrane laughs. “If there’s one band that know how to lose money, it’s us.” In making Millennials independently, though, a fresh frugality kicked in. After writing sessions in Fort William at the foot of Ben Nevis, the album was recorded on a laptop in tour buses and hotel rooms on tour in Japan, Australia and America. “Every song’s 100 miles an hour,” Cochrane grins, “because we were living 100 miles an hour making it.” They also booked sessions in Scotland’s cheapest studio on a remote island only accessible by boat. “There was nothing there, no pub, no shop,” Cochrane recalls. “But it was costing us pennies and our output was not affected by that. We were fine, we didn’t need the luxury because with that comes that pressure as well.”

The band are also well-versed in building a musical community from scratch. Like most overnight sensations, The Snuts’ breakthrough was the result of six years of grassroots graft. While working day jobs as joiners, roofers and mechanics, they gathered their devoted fanbase through a dozen or so online single releases and hundreds of local pub gigs, often alongside their old schoolmate Lewis Capaldi.

“Lewis was always saying, ‘I want to be a pop star and I want to be as big as Ed Sheeran,’” Cochrane says. “My whole thing was, ‘I wanna be a rock’n’roll star like The Libertines.’ He’s just gone in this crazy skyrocket direction.” He particularly recalls Capaldi’s performance at the last local charity night Cochrane put on. “He’d just brought out his first single and the place was stowed out. His manager was like, ‘No cameras!’”

With Capaldi currently taking an indefinite break to concentrate on his mental health, Cochrane has found it difficult to watch his old friend struggling with the expectations of modern pop promotion. “It’s happened so quickly for him and he’s the OG of having to feel the pressure of what that’s like in this new way,” he says, sympathetically. “He was first to be super funny on the phone and doing a lot of videos, but it’s been hard to watch him having to deal with everything that’s come with his rise. I find it really intense to see. Doing as well as he’s doing and as talented as he is, he should be really happy and enjoy that. But something somewhere’s happened that’s skewed that and I think that’s pretty s***, man.”

The Snuts’ success, meanwhile, was something of an uncomfortable revelation for some. A small-town Scottish band with little media support hitting No 1 with their first album – mid-pandemic, no less – acted as a wake-up call for those who’d written off guitar music from north of Peckham as defunct. Similar displays of people power would send The Lathums, The Reytons, and The Lottery Winners to equally eye-opening No 1s. Yet respect isn’t exactly gushing towards these home-made rock gods.

As soon as a band comes along, especially four wee guys with guitars from a wee working-class place, you’re quickly put in a box that’s like ‘indie band’… We never felt like we were a part of that scene

“We stopped looking for that,” says Cochrane. “If you’re living in a time when guitar music isn’t the in thing, you’ll be fighting all day every day for people to give you the respect you desire… As soon as a band comes along, especially four wee guys with guitars from a wee working-class place, you’re quickly put in a box that’s like ‘indie band’… We never felt like we were a part of that scene.”

In recent years, though, a new method of alt-pop breakout has emerged. After similar gigging groundwork to The Snuts, acts such as Wet Leg and The Last Dinner Party have exploded onto timelines with the release of long-awaited first singles, prompting suspicious – and ridiculous – accusations that they’re some manner of “industry plant”. As if every act you’ve ever heard of hasn’t been “planted” in your way by some agent of the industry or other.

“I think there’s a real sexism, with those two acts especially, in why people are suspicious,” says Cochrane. “Very rarely do male bands get accused as industry plants. [They’re] good examples of not having to be overly personality driven. All their personality is in their music and how they present themselves so they don’t have to do a lot of this, ‘Hi, we’re this, show me a picture of your dog to this sound…’”

As an artist who has built his success from determined hard work and uncompromising principles, and maintained it by challenging himself and his audience at every step, it’s the TikTok sensations that raise Cochrane’s heckles. “There’s such a shift now where you can get so many eyes on you online first,” he says. “People are going into their first ever show and they’ve got 100 million followers. That feels really backwards. You need to do those rubbish shows, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.”

For a second this endearing young fighter, happily in control of his own future, takes on the tone of the hardened label boss. “It’s just like any job,” he says. “You need to learn.”

‘Millennials’ is out now via Happy Artist Records