Reuniting your original band after 30 years apart sounds like the plot of a charming indie film—or maybe a cautionary tale—but for Modern English, it was just what happened when bassist Mick Conroy moved closer to singer Robbie Grey and casually asked, “How do you feel about getting the band back together?” Cue jaws dropping and phone calls being made, and suddenly the lineup behind Mesh & Lace and After the Snow was mostly back in action.
“We didn’t want to sound like a load of old men,” Grey says flatly, which is an understatement for Take Me to the Trees, the band’s snarling, spiky return from 2017 that plays like a lost post-punk gem somehow beamed in from 1982 with Wi-Fi.
“We wanted to get back to the early days… forget all the intervening years,” Grey admits. “There’s nothing there worth talking about really.”
They weren't trying to rehash their past, but they weren’t running from it either. Take Me to the Trees bristles with angular guitar, classic British sneer, and the kind of tension that only comes from having survived your own legacy. And Grey knows exactly what they were up against. “All the dangers seem to be in the youth of music,” he says. “But we worked really hard on trying not to sound too old.”
Mission accomplished. Songs like “Sweet Revenge” and “You're Corrupt” come loaded with urgency, fury, and the same sonic twitchiness that made the early stuff cult-canon. The former was born from rehearsal jams; the latter, Grey explains, is “about all the corruption and power and lies and money going… one percent of the planet’s got all the wealth. It’s disgusting really.”
Political anger clearly hasn’t aged out of him. “Come on, you must be as fed up as the rest of the planet,” he barks, before invoking Brexit, Trump, and the long shadow of Reagan. “Things haven’t changed that much really.”
But Take Me to the Trees isn’t just protest anthems in skinny jeans. There’s “I Feel Small,” a left-turn ballad built like a Rod Stewart classic played through a cardboard radio. “We tried to make a song from the bottom up that wasn’t massive,” Grey says, “like a 70s recording… more about the melody.”
Even the Bowie comparisons—specifically “Heroes” vibes on the title track—were unintentional, though welcomed. “People have mentioned it, but no, we weren’t trying to do that,” Grey insists. “Bowie was a major influence… he was a small piece of color on your television set.”
Still, no matter how righteous or reinvigorated a record is, it’s hard to escape the weight of that song—the eternal indie prom theme, “I Melt With You.” “Obviously that song pays all the bills,” Grey says without irony. “So we’re not financially in trouble or anything like that.”
Which is exactly why Take Me to the Trees sounds like it does—untethered from expectations, unwilling to chase hits, and stubbornly alive. Or, as Grey put it, “We literally just made the music we wanted to make.”
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the track below.
