Despite their affinity for chorus pedals and Katie Dillon’s clear, swooping vocals, She’s In Parties are not the next Cocteau Twins but that is a much better reference point than drawing any conclusions from their Bauhaus-derived name; there is nothing goth about the Colchester, UK quartet.

Unsurprisingly, NME is to blame for the Cocteaus comparison, via their feature on the band last week, but the through-line only really works if you’re talking about Robin Guthrie’s remix of Hatchie’s “Sure”. Actually, never mind the Guthire remix – they’ve only got a half-dozen tracks to their name, released over the last two plus years, but they tick all the right boxes for shimmery, melancholicly sunny dreampop and sound very much in line with the sounds that Hatchie made her name with. Certainly not something we can have too much of.

The She’s In Parties origin story as told to NME is pretty straightforward:

She’s In Parties were brought together by Dillon, who “recruited” the lads after deciding she wanted to start a band. “I only really knew Herbie, because we went to school together,” she explains. “The rest of the guys lived in Colchester, I didn’t know any of them. It was like, ‘We’re gonna have to get to know each other!’,” she adds. “But then it became super awesome making music together.”

She’s In Parties are taking a bracingly modern approach to shoegaze @ NME

Although unlike a lot of bands, their initial momentum was stymied by a little thing called COVID.

“We’d just formed, and then Covid hit. We were still getting to know each other, so that was a difficult point where we didn’t know each other and what we wanted. As soon as we were able to practice again, that’s where the collaborations started to happen with us; we started going out to the pub and actually getting to know each other. It’s a weird experience, but it’s good now we’re out of it.”

She’s In Parties: “If you lucid dream or like weed, then you’ll like this band” @ Dork

Their debut EP End Scene is out on October 6, and they just released a couple tracks from it – “The L Word” and “Summer Haze” – as a preview, but I’m going to reach back to last Summer when they put out a couple of videos for tracks that started to garner them attention.