“You can’t choose to be an artist. It’s something that you have to compulsively do” Tough Cookie are mastering their own vision of intimate guitar music
It’s a quiet afternoon as two-thirds of East London act Tough Cookie (vocalist and guitarist August Tse, fellow guitarist Jess Ayres and bassist Daniel Hvorostovsky) are settling into Denmark Street’s buzzy guitar shop, Regent Sounds.
On a street that is overflowing with music history, Regent Sounds takes some topping – before it was a guitar shop, the space was a studio used by everyone from Hendrix to the Stones, and in its life as a guitar shop it continues to attract music fans from across the world.
READ MORE: Hudson Freeman wants to soundtrack the end of America. All he needs is a nylon-string guitar
It’s hard not to feel the weight of the place when T-Bone Walker’s 1949 Gibson ES-5N (currently up for sale on Reverb for £1.5m) sits in its temperature controlled case next to where we’re sitting down to get to know one of the UK’s most intriguing new guitar bands.
On their emotionally-wrought new EP, Devotion, Tough Cookie enshroud you in a cathartic release, one that needle points moments of devastation, acceptance and healing. Taken from the title from a Patti Smith book, the band cycle through tracks which feel like excavating grief as you watch the familiar warmth of someone close fizzle out.
Together, primarily, August and Dan created detailed, nuanced songs that capture the storytelling of Jeff Buckley and Elliott Smith, all of which were recorded in a haunted East London church basement. We sat down with Tough Cookie to hear more about their must-listen new record.
Image: Press
It’s been a while since you released your 2025 project The Countryside Is Good For You. How have things changed for Tough Cookie since then?
Jess: “So much has changed. It was so great to get that initial bit of music out, but it’s been even better to get this next EP out because it feels so much more authentic to who we are now as a band.”
Dan: “It’s more a concise piece of work than the previous which was written over so many years, and then we took it into a studio and re-recorded everything in the space of two days to make it sound cohesive. We love it as a piece of work, but, as musicians, we are looking back on it thinking it feels disconnected because of the narratives, the songs and the instrumentation and style of play on each of the songs. This time we tried to make it concise by keeping the guitar sounds consistent on this project.”
You recorded the EP in a church basement and it feels like a more formative project for the band. How do you feel you’ve grown as musicians?
Jess: “It was like learning of an identity, to be honest. Our first mixtape was quite literally a mixtape – it was songs from different eras of this band’s life. Whereas making the EP was like ‘okay, cool, this is Tough Cookie’s identity now.’”
Dan: “It feels like we’re able to write the emotions out onto paper and into the music itself and have everything sort of back itself up.”
August: “I think understanding the relationship between the music and art has changed. It was all trial and error for the first mixtape, and there was the decisive direction we went with at the time, but I don’t think it matched the music we were creating because the music was disconnected. I think a lot more preparation was done with this EP because we knew what we wanted it to sound like, so it forced the things I was painting so the whole world feels more concise.”
How did each of you get involved with the guitar as an instrument? Do you have any special anecdotes tied to learning to play the guitar or any notable artists that influenced you?
August: “I remember hearing Maroon 5 in the She Will Be Loved era. Guitar music wasn’t really part of my world until I became a teenager. I listened to Green Day and My Chemical Romance, more emo/punk stuff. People I was friends with in Asia didn’t listen to guitar music, so I wasn’t exposed to it. My family didn’t either so moving to England was the first step into it.”
Dan: “For me, it wasn’t that late. I got my first guitar when I was 13 and I taught myself because my mum really liked the Beatles, and she got me the Beatles songbook, which had the chords above the lyrics. It had standard music notation, which I could already read because I started by playing the piano so I started learning all these Beatles tracks. After playing acoustic guitar and listening to things like Guns N’ Roses, I want an electric guitar and got into heavy metal music.
“I was trying to play Avenged Sevenfold songs and stuff like that. When I met August, we decided to switch instruments because August used to play bass in another band and I also played a guitar, and then I got infatuated with the bass guitar. August got infatuated with the electric guitar, so we kind of swapped and pseudo taught each other to play those instruments.”
Jess: “Around the same time that they were teaching each other their instruments. I was figuring out the alternative direction I wanted to go in because I was playing acoustic guitar for ages.
“I was playing rhythm mostly. I was trying to do the neo-soul thing, and it was quickly becoming apparent that was just not gonna be my thing, so I started playing in a punk-inspired riot girrrl band and thought electric guitars were fun, probably for the same realisation Dan had around at a similar time which is interesting. We were all in the same place, but it was happening in parallel.”
How does guitar music come into the fold of Tough Cookie’s discography? Are there any artists or styles of playing the band have learned or taken inspo from?
Dan: “Leading on from when August and I were teaching each other our instruments, we were both studying music at different unis in Leeds. I was studying harmony and classical harmony and then that sort of opened doors into modern music. Radiohead became a massive influence in terms of the songwriting in the production and soundscape of the whole thing.
“It’s more of how can we make the world and the ambiance with the guitar with the pedals that we’re using so there isn’t a normal sort of lead [guitar] line. We wanted to focus more on the feeling rather than the parts.”
Jess: “They talked a lot about what a part of a song elicits in terms of emotion as well as the track and how it’s played.”
Dan: “You can play a lead part in so many ways. It’s about the emotion, the feeling and the mood of it.”
Image: Press
Your debut mixtape The Countryside Is Good For You was “a journey of self discovery amid chaos”. This era is detailed with stories of painful choices and moments of self-preservation. How did you tap into that deep emotional part of yourselves?
Dan: “I think it’s just the way we were all feeling at the time. That sort of chaos from the first record is still there, and I think we’ll always still be there in the way that we feel, especially mental health-wise. I don’t think anyone’s perfect, and people go through phases. People go up and down all the time and that’s definitely reflected in the record and the way that it feels in the lyrics, which are predominantly August wrote. It’s very much from their perspective and the way that they’re feeling. As much as we chip in with stuff as well, but it’s also it’s all just to reinforce this main storyline.”
The EP takes its name and emotional thread from Patti Smith’s book Devotion. Are there any other books that fed your creativity?
August: “A lot of William Burroughs and Devotion influenced it quite heavily. Not so much in what happens in the book, but I think some of the themes are definitely reflected in the record.
“The book is about an ice skater and there’s this man watching her, but the whole point of it it’s talking about her devotion to ice skating. I think that was quite important when it came to this EP – how devoted we are as people to making music and doing this, because it’s not an easy industry, and there are lots of things that get in the way and to still be doing it is quite a lot.”
Dan: “There’s also other themes that are carried through like the lack of spirituality or losing spirituality, which is definitely reflecting some of the songs like Mercy. The EP is also about the compulsion to make music. It’s like in Patti Smith’s Devotion, it’s about how you can’t choose to be an artist. It’s something that you have to compulsively do. Something that you don’t you don’t have control over, and this is the only way that you can express yourself and be alive and exist.”
Do you each have a song that’s a particular favourite from the EP?
Dan: “My favourite is Tragedy Frontline. This is a song that I worked really, really hard to bring to the band and make everybody understand. It took a while for people to understand it, but as soon as soon as they got here, things started flowing in the right direction.”
August: “The lyrics came really quickly too. I wrote them in a day. Mercy was done really quickly too.”
Dan: “Although we were fighting about the chorus because August didn’t like it at first, so we sat on it. We sort of slept on it overnight. The next day, you were like, ‘Oh no, actually, this slaps!’”
August: “I liked it, but I couldn’t write a vocal for it because I just didn’t know what to do. I think I was watching this Bob Dylan movie. I say that the melody came into my head from above, but maybe I’m just stealing Bob Dylan’s. I don’t really know. My favourite is Let Me Die, probably. I like it because it’s got double meaning. I think it doesn’t mean what people think it means.”
Jess: “I’d say that’s mine as well. August and Dan are heading up the writing, so when the songs came to me it was almost a fully fleshed out song. I get the privilege of listening to something and having my own first impression of it without really knowing where the creative decision has come from. There was an emotion within me that I couldn’t really put my finger on it, but it was pulling something. It definitely elicits the most emotion for me.”
Now the EP is out, how are you hoping the music is received?
Jess: “This EP is the embodiment of mental health so I hope listeners can see themselves in it. That’s the best way I can think of because that’s how it’s meant to be.”
August: “I want people to take the time to understand it rather than just listening to our face value, because the reason it took so long to write some songs is that there usually is a deeper meaning behind each one. It would be fulfilling to know people have put some thought into the lyrics as much as I did writing them.”
Devotion is out now on Capitol Records UK
The post “You can’t choose to be an artist. It’s something that you have to compulsively do” Tough Cookie are mastering their own vision of intimate guitar music appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
