PRESIDENT

About PRESIDENT

PRESIDENT started as a side project that accidentally became a main thing. The London-based band formed around primary school friends Callum Melville and Tom Mitchener, who'd been making music together since they were kids but only got serious about it in their twenties. They added drummer Sam Fallon and bassist Steve Wilkinson, and what emerged was something harder to pin down than most guitar bands kicking around the UK circuit.

Their early material leaned into a kind of sleazy, angular post-punk that felt intentionally uncomfortable. The 2015 debut EP "Young Forever Young Together" announced them as a band uninterested in making things easy. Melville's vocals switched between deadpan speak-singing and genuine aggression, while the guitars carved out space rather than filling it. Songs like "Whenever I Start to Have That Dream" showed they could write hooks that stuck with you even when you weren't sure you wanted them to.

The first full-length, "Run for Your Life," arrived in 2017 and split people pretty evenly. Some heard a band refining their sound into something more focused and ambitious. Others thought they'd sanded off the rough edges that made them interesting in the first place. Tracks like "Lovely" and "Solid Gold" had bigger production and clearer melodies, but still kept that underlying tension. The album never quite broke through the way their label probably hoped, but it built them a dedicated following who appreciated that they weren't trying to sound like anyone else.

They went quiet after that initial album cycle. Not broken up quiet, just the kind of silence that happens when a band regroups and figures out what comes next. They kept playing occasional shows and working on new material without much fanfare. In 2021 they released "Take Care," a standalone single that suggested they'd been spending their time well. It was tighter and stranger than their earlier work, with a groove that felt almost danceable despite still being fundamentally unsettling.

More recently they've been drip-feeding new tracks and playing select shows, mostly around London and Europe. The new material suggests they're still evolving, pulling in influences from electronic music and industrial sounds without abandoning what made them compelling initially. They're not chasing trends or trying to recapture whatever momentum they had before. They're just making the music they want to make, which in 2025 feels almost radical.

PRESIDENT remains a band for people who like their guitar music a little off-center, who appreciate craftsmanship but don't need everything polished to a shine. They've never been the biggest band in any room, but they've outlasted plenty of their contemporaries by simply refusing to compromise on being exactly what they are.

PRESIDENT plays tight, no-nonsense sets where the focus stays on the songs themselves. Crowds are attentive rather than raucous—the kind of shows where people actually listen. Band's got solid chemistry and moves through material efficiently. No talking between songs, minimal stage banter. Just shows up and plays.

Known for Liftoff, Electric Eye, Common Ground, Neon Nights

See PRESIDENT Live