Welcoming in the new year with the best new music down at The Hug and Pint throughout January!

Former Champ make rich, characterful and unabashedly anthemic songs dense with melody, experience, and the contradictions of contemporary life. Musically, there’s echoes of Teenage Fanclub’s melodic sixth sense, The Strokes’ early dichotomy of coolness and control, and the primary-coloured hedonism of Thin Lizzy.

The five members of Former Champ are long-time friends, and here, they’re uniquely bound together by their drive to make a big musical swing, to give everything they have to a shared need to reach out into the world. The result is something muscular, unafraid, played and sung like the last thing the band will ever play.

In previous bands, in previous times, the members of Former Champ may have been trepidatious, but there’s no time for that here.