When the Leicester band were forced to drop their old name after a legal threats from a certain budget airline, it could have been curtains. But frontman Murray Matravers’s trip to Japan has prompted a bold new outlook – and an upbeat new album

When writing songs, “95% of the time” Murray Matravers starts with the title. It’s a tactic he picked up from Gary Barlow: a producer once told him the Take That man tends to arrive at sessions touting a load of prospective song titles “cut out on little pieces of paper, and he’d put them on the table and you could just choose one. I was like: that’s fucking brilliant. Ever since I’ve always had loads of titles in my Notes app. It actually changed the way I wrote music,” he says with genuine enthusiasm. “Shout out to Gary Barlow!”

Names are clearly very important to the 29-year-old – but in recent years they have also caused him untold stress. By 2023, Matravers’ band Easy Life was thriving, having scored two No 2 albums on the trot by fusing upbeat, synthy bedroom pop with wry emo-rap. But that same year, his career came to a screeching halt when easyGroup – owners of the easyJet brand name with a long history of taking legal action against businesses with the word “easy” in their branding – decided to sue the Leicester band for trademark infringement.