In the middle of the Florida Summer, St. Petersburg shoegaze/indie band Seafang recorded two Christmas songs for a vinyl release as part of the Snowflakes Christmas Singles Club. One week before it is officially out, The Big Takeover is overjoyed to premiere the single, and to get you in a festive mood. After all, it is only 44 days to Christmas!

Seafang formed as the result of a more-or-less spontaneous session in a local St. Petersburg practice space. Guitarists Susan and Stacy were playing in a band together, wanted to start something new, and one day, they were joined by Paul on drums and Heidi on vocals and bass. When Stacy’s husband Gary, who played in 1990s indie band Honeyrider, took over the bass for a few songs so Heidi could concentrate on vocals, it all clicked and the first few songs of the band that would become Seafang were written.

About a year later, in the summer of 2016, the band released its debut single “Motorcycle” on local label Elephant Stone, that was brought back to life after four years of inactivity to release the single. The single was very well received, with reviewers mentioning Lush, Shop Assistants, The Jesus & Mary Chain, the Dum Dum Girls, and Veronica Falls to describe the music of the band – a mixture between the UK C86 bands, shoegaze, and the Sixties pop of The Shangri-Las and The Beach Boys.

With a second single, “Solid Gold”, released on the very active Emotional Response label in the summer of 2017, the band further broadened its appeal.

In May 2017, Seafang was asked by Amsterdam-based record label Snowflakes to record a Christmas single as part of the fifth edition of the annual Snowflakes Christmas Singles Club – previous editions featured artists as diverse as Smoke Fairies, The Manhattan Love Suicides, Hannah Epperson, Tele Novella, Juniore, and Hannah Peel. The band happily agreed and went into the studio in the midst of the hot Florida summer to record two Christmas songs, one original and one cover.

Seafang chose to cover a song of one of their main inspirations, The Primitives’ “You Trashed My Christmas”, a song that was included on the 2012 Elefant Records Christmas compilation. Without straying too far from the original, Seafang add some shoegaze elements and keyboards in the background, and in that way make the song their own.

The atmospheric and ethereal “Happy When It Snows”, a self-penned song that is featured on the A-side of the single, has layers of guitars and keyboards, that, together with Heidi’s soft sounding vocals, create the feeling of floating amid snowflakes that are whirling down from the sky.

The single comes in an edition of 320 copies, pressed on beautiful snow white vinyl, and is also digitally available from Novemer 17th onward. So are the two other singles of these year’s edition of the Snowflakes Christmas Singles Club, by Scottish indie-poppers Bis and French psychedelic garage band The Limiñanas, who collaborate on their single with French multi-instrumentalist Pascal Comelade.

Seafang Facebook
Seafang Bandcamp
Seafang Twitter
Seafang YouTube

Snowflakes record label website
Snowflakes Facebook
Snowflakes Blogspot