Sarah Harvey is standing at the oche, immersed in an adrenaline rush. As the Panic Shack vocalist’s first dart thunks into the outer bullseye, the crowd behind her – comprising NME, Harvey’s bandmates and various staff members at a north London bar – begins to stir. By the time her second slams into the same spot, the sense of anticipation is palpable. She draws her arm back once more, and… boing! Barely a second later, the third dart misses the target completely, and bounces off the board before rolling across the floor like tumbleweed. Cue pandemonium. “That was mad,” laughs bassist Emily Smith, sending herself hoarse before she has even thrown.
Spending time with Panic Shack is like watching a chaotic house party unfold. In between taking turns at various darts games, the band – completed by guitarists Megan Fretwell and Romi Lawrence – swig espresso martinis and speak in a secret language of carefully deployed eyebrow raises. Shortly after we move away from the dartboard, they admit to having toggled with their responses in previous interviews, even telling one journalist an absurd lie: that they were all once part of a mixed synchronised swimming team. “From the start, we’ve made sure that we always find a way to take the piss,” says Smith.
The band are enjoying some time out from the near-relentless schedule of their first-ever UK headline tour, which has seen them perform 13 gigs in little over a fortnight. They are openly tired, but as we speak, each member is keen to stress how this tour has been a transitional moment for Panic Shack. “I think the biggest measure of our growth over the past year is in how we’ve sold out these shows,” says Fretwell. “It feels crazy, but at the same time, we deserve this because we’ve worked our arses off.”
A barreling determination has been at the heart of Panic Shack since day dot. The four-piece formed in 2018 out of Cardiff’s DIY-minded scene; soon enough, the graft they put in across the local circuit resulted in an early appearance at the city’s award-winning Sŵn Festival. In a crowded field, what continues to differentiate Panic Shack from their peers is how lively and spiky their music is, with all its edges unsmoothed. 2022 debut EP ‘Baby Shack’ traversed through a range of emotions – from tenacity (‘Jiu Jits You’) to disgust (‘I Don’t Really Like It’) – with a zeal you rarely hear in other young bands today, offering wild-eyed choruses that unspool in bursts of giddy, stop-start guitars.
“There’s a new confidence that comes to you as a woman as you grow older, and we all needed to realise that,” says Lawrence. “We used to go to gigs and see boys in bands and think, ‘Surely it isn’t that hard…” Smith jumps in: “It’s all bravado! When you start paying attention at gigs, you can think to yourself, ‘I can fucking do that.’” And so they did: Harvey honed her confidence as a vocalist at weekly karaoke nights, while the rest of the band taught themselves how to play their instruments in under a year. Soon enough, a brilliant new punk force was born.
The reward for being a Panic Shack fan, it seems, is directly proportional to believing in their ecstatic message. Over the past year, their live shows have become a genuine word-of-mouth sensation amongst UK punk fans; before the band’s current headline tour, they hit the road with Yard Act, and worked large venues like seasoned standups with their in-jokes and choreographed dance breaks. Harvey explains that the latter – which sees the band strike matching, exaggerated poses with each other – was inspired by seeing Solange’s synchronised backing band perform at Primavera Festival in 2019.
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Yet their performances have caused division, too. A TikTok clip of Panic Shack playing ‘The Ick’ at last year’s Reading Festival saw app users tear apart the band’s speak-sing delivery and lyrics, centering on a line where Harvey sings about refusing to be “shushed in the cinema”. For every TikTok success story, there’s also a side to the app that encourages ridicule towards unassuming acts; the video reached over a million reviews in a week, and any hate – including accusations that Panic Shack were “cosplaying” their working-class upbringings – was fanned by the very nature of social media. Even Wet Leg jumped to the band’s defence, commenting that they “relate” to their experience, having previously received similar backlash on TikTok. “I feel like the common denominator here is that people still show misogyny towards women making quirky, alternative music,” adds Smith.
Panic Shack are acutely aware that their lyrics aren’t meant to be revolutionary, nor is their gung-ho approach to performing live. “Following the TikTok drama, there were moments where I was really doubting everything that we were doing as a band,” says Harvey, describing how she was “glued” to her phone as the nasty comments continued to roll in. “It really did put a seed of doubt in your mind,” Lawrence says to her, before turning to face NME. “We’d never experienced hate like that before because we are like an echo chamber. We speak to an alternative audience, so the masses coming after us was quite scary. We are just here to have fun!”
In response to the online hate, listeners set up The Baby Shack, a Facebook fan page that has quickly morphed into a space to marvel at the community that Panic Shack are beginning to foster. This kind of devotion, fostered organically, is abundantly clear at their shows, where the audience bring just as much action to the set as the band does on stage. “The whole place was radiating with positivity,” said one group member in a post following a recent gig at Leeds’ Brudenell Social Club. The momentum will continue, as Panic Shack have a huge summer of touring ahead, with stops at Sheffield’s Get Together Festival and Manchester Psych Fest in the coming months.
“When we have a low, we come back up much stronger,” says Harvey. “Our friendship is really like no other.” The power of that bond is illuminating – and has been evident from the moment her opening dart was thrown.
Panic Shack’s debut EP ‘Baby Shack’ is out now via Brace Yourself Records