First Black Eye in Hackney

''The worst part of being in a band is the periods in between bursts of activity''

ha, i got this from Bradford Cox's deerhunter/atlas sound blog...a sentiment that couldnt ring truer for me in this past week of inactivity. The last 6 weeks of Cut Off Your Hands life has been pretty hectic playing shows from the states to the UK, Australia, NZ, Japan, NZ again, then UK again..to the point where we were exhausted and so relieved to have a couple weeks off, but yeah its getting boring doing nothing now.

Apparently we live in one of the roughest neighbourhoods in Hackney, there's supposed to be a gang war going on right now here, yep, its stepped up from gang 'feud' to war. I'm not sure what the defining moment was. The other night after being at a party with some friends me and phil jumped off the bus around 2am at Daubeney Rd only 2 minutes walk from our place, a walk all of us and the many friends we've had stay have walked 100's of times in the past few months whilst we've been here. 2 guys confronted us and i cant be bothered going into details but i got my camera stolen and some mean cuts to my legs, and phil got a bit of a black eye, the only bad thing about the whole incident was that they chased us to our door and attempted to barge our door down. Luckily they were weak and their attempts failed, but it was pretty shit really. So in my next week off me and phil are heading to holland to see my cousins and have a good time..oh i also cracket the screen on my computer meaning i cant record or use internet without borrowing friends computers..thanks mikey for leaving your computer here during your trip to Ireland.

Anyway enough negative stuff, Im pretty excited that for our next release here in the UK we'l be putting out an ep with a couple songs from the record as well as some recently recorded tracks which we didnt get time to do for the record. The song ''Shorelines'' is one of my favorite songs of ours lyrically, as it's dedicated to our friend Andrew Atkinson who died last year after a horrible accident jumping off a bridge in the province of Waikato in NZ. Andy was a rad, loyal and beautiful friend to so many, i hope this song can somehow, (not too cheesily) represent the above sentiments. We miss you Andy.

The EP tracklisting should look something like:

1. (as of yet untitled)
2. Happy As Can Be (title track)
3. Shorelines-
4. Iron Sleep
5. Nostalgia