Tommy Lefroy

“Many of us are, or are at risk of falling into the precariat.” This urgency inspired the title of the debut record by Tommy Lefroy, the soft rock project of Wynter Bethel and Tessa Mouzourakis.

The Precariat, a portmanteau of ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’, was popularised by economist Guy Standing to identify a new class riddled with financial fear and job insecurity, trapped in circumstances beyond their control and at the mercy of systems stacked against them. The band found the term a perfect metaphor for both global and deeply personal experiences of increasing precarity.

A timestamp of fraught, unstable times in which it was written, the album’s themes come to light through deceptively immediate, earworm indie-rock, cementing Tommy Lefroy as a vital and timely new voice.

“The level of insecurity, even in America is insane. There's no ceiling but there's no floor; there's nothing catching people. We felt a responsibility to speak to this experience that so many people are having, to do something about it,” says Bethel, originally hailing from rural Michigan. “As far as I'm concerned, art is not neutral,” Mouzourakis, from Vancouver, Canada, continues. “I have no interest in being an artist that's apolitical - to me, that’s not art.”

The Precariat arrives as an invigorated, impassioned call to arms: a clarion call to look up and zoom out, delivered by a pair of musicians who’ve put in the hours to back it up.

“We treated this record like a thesis and really studied what we were writing about,” says Mouzourakis. “Learning about it all was kind of life-changing. The whole point is that [this time in history] is very alienating, but we're all experiencing it and we can all work together. That is power and that is resistance, and that is inherently hopeful.”