“Would you just stop printing photos of me covered in blood, please?!” laughs Ryan Jarman, recalling the chaotic, heady days of the mid-noughties when his band The Cribs were at the epicentre of a golden age for British guitar music. The numerous larger-than-life characters that populated the music scene felt like they were living in an uproariously fun and nihilistic cartoon. “The music press was really gossip-led,” adds Ryan’s brother, Gary. “They created caricatures, and every band or artist had a role to fulfil in this weird soap opera.
“At the time, it used to frustrate us, but looking back, you can totally see why it happened. The narrative that kids in small towns who weren’t getting to lead that life would read about it seemed really exciting. I meet anglophiles out here in the US who used to read the NME, and they’d be like, every week, I couldn’t wait to see what happened with people. There was something romantic and thrilling about that, but you don’t recognise it at the time.”
The Cribs have had a lot of time recently to reflect, going right back to those wild mid-noughties days and their ensuing career for over 20 years as one of the UK’s most respected and consistently brilliant bands who have always stayed true to their cherished punk ideals. With that reliability, though, came a sense of dislocation: they needed a reminder of who The Cribs were and why they were really doing this. An enforced break of almost five years – following a protracted legal battle over the band’s recordings and a post-pandemic malaise after 2020’s ‘Night Network’ – prompted the first real period of reflection for The Cribs that ultimately birthed ‘Selling A Vibe’, a record that encapsulates everything about the band in perfectly distilled form.
“We’ve never had any degree of ego, but until before this record, we’ve never had any time off to stop and smell the flowers or take stock of things,” explains Ryan. “We are going into it now with a blank slate and a bit more clarity. For a long time, we had a feeling that, not from fans of the band, but just in general, we were taken for granted. We were always going to release a record every couple of years; we were always going to be on tour. Maybe that’s us being down on ourselves and down to our own self-consciousness, but we always felt that’s how things were for us. The band was this war of attrition where we just had to keep ploughing forward. It’s really done us a lot of good to have a bit of time away from the grind of it all.”
Part of that period of reflection involved looking back on that period around their second album, ‘The New Fellas’, when it felt like chaos was around every corner. Ryan took on the persona of an indie-pop stunt man, readily able to clamber on tables, swing from rafters, smash his bloody mouth into microphones, and just generally live life on the edge. People like to talk about lore in the context of major pop artists, but few bands have the sort of lore that The Cribs cultivated in those hedonistic days.
“I was just thinking, could you imagine if there was a band out now who were living like the Cribs were living in 2004? It would seem insane,” laughs Ryan. “You’d be worried about them,” Gary interjects. “No one worried about anyone back in our day. That was a negative thing from that period of time. Nobody would worry about your health. People wanted that. Think about that Edinburgh Liquid Room show when the stage collapsed. That would have been a viral moment now, with some people saying it was awesome and some people saying it was totally irresponsible, and the venue needs to be shut down. It was pretty intense at the time, but pretty much everyone there brings it up as a good memory.” (Dork can confirm we were indeed there, and it’s a very good memory.)
“We’ve never had any time off to stop and smell the flowers”
An older, wiser and thankfully less blood-soaked Ryan Jarman now has a different perspective on that period and appreciates that special moment in The Cribs’ story. “Back in the day, I used to get sick of how I was portrayed in the press,” says Ryan. “It seemed reductive, and I just wished they focused on the music rather than the insanity, but now I’m a lot more philosophical about it. There should always be more to unpack and more to read about than, ‘And then they put this record out, and this song reached number whatever’. We’ve been around for twenty years, so it would be a missed opportunity if you weren’t writing a story at the same time.”
‘Selling A Vibe’ is a continuation of the same story but with a fresh impetus and a desire to just be The Cribs and focus on their strengths. “Up until the pandemic and our legal issues, we were still living the same life that we’ve lived since ‘The New Fellas’ period onwards,” says Gary. “It was all a continuation of the same lineage. When you have that pause, you look back and something that you were pursuing since you were twenty years old is now so different twenty years down the line. So many people have fallen by the wayside. Some have died. You just think, how are we still here? We had enough time away to really decontextualise everything and realise we were doing this because we really wanted to do it. Writing and making the record, we were really engaged with it rather than feeling compelled that we needed to keep this going.”
When it came to thinking about what it was that really made The Cribs, it all boiled down to something fundamental – the relationship between the three brothers. Forged in a Wakefield bedroom but now disconnected, with Gary and Ryan living in different cities in America and Ross back in their hometown. It’s a relationship that the three of them viewed in a different light for perhaps the first time. “It did feel liberating to actually have a relationship with each other. It felt liberating to talk to each other, and the band just didn’t come up. You realise it has consumed everything,” reflects Ryan.
“At the cellular level of our relationship, it was there, so for it not to be that was clarifying,” says Gary. “You’re a different person at the age you are now than when you were 21. At 21, you don’t think you’re ever going to die. Nothing really matters. It’s a virtuous pursuit of art and rock and roll. It’s a weird thing to get clarity 20 years in, but it was really good for us.”
Exemplifying the band’s renewed focus on their brotherhood is ‘Selling A Vibe”s key song and closing track, the anthemic howl of defiance of ‘Brothers Won’t Break’. It doesn’t get any more direct than that.
“‘Brothers Won’t Break’ is a pretty stark song,” explains Gary. “All we’ve ever done is react. We’ve always tried to be lyrically sincere as a band. ‘The New Fellas’ was so chaotic and outward-looking and focused on the scene because that’s what we were living at the time. We had an extended period of reflection, and the thing that came out of that is an appreciation of what we’ve got as a band and what defines us as different to what other bands have. We’ve always had the solidarity between the three of us. It’s something that has kept us going.”
It’s a solidarity bound by the band’s fierce independent values. “We’ve never had problems with the integrity of the band,” continues Gary. “We’ve always got each other’s backs. When we were fighting over control of the catalogue, we realised that we all look out for each other. There’s never been any power struggles. That naturally came out in the lyrics. We’d spent the last couple of years doing a lot of self-reflection, and instead of beating ourselves up, we focused on the positives. There’s a lot to be said for our relationship. You don’t want to get to the end of the band having ignored the most fundamental relationship. We’ve written about so many others – romantic relationships, business relationships, relationships within the music scene – but we’ve never written about our own relationship.”
“We never discuss our lyrics,” says Ryan of The Cribs’ writing process, but this time around, it seemed they were intrinsically on the same page. “We’ve never been blunt with each other about what the songs are about. For this record, it seemed a bit, ‘You know what I’ve been dealing with, I know what you’ve been dealing with, we know what the songs are about’, so it felt like we could be a bit more on the nose with stuff.”
“You just think, how are we still here?”
A further injection of freshness and new ideas came from the record’s producer, former Chairlift member Patrick Wimberly. Working with Patrick carried on The Cribs’ unique trend of using a different producer for every one of their nine albums.
“You do hear it when bands work with the same producer, and you do hear when things have gone a bit stale and revert to type a little bit,” says Ryan. “That seems antithetical to art. We always like working with other people and seeing what they bring to it. You can see why people use the same producer because they say it was really comfortable, but that’s a negative when it comes to making art. You should be removing the comfort element.”
Continuity of sound isn’t really something that has appealed to the band. “It’s such a cool way to spend your life because every time you make a record you’re documenting what you’ve been doing over the last two years and who you are at that point in your life,” enthuses Gary. “It’s like a public time capsule. Every time you do it, you’re a different person. Keeping something consistent, like the sound, doesn’t seem appealing. We’re not just trying to make content. We’re trying to document something.”
The Cribs have always been passionately idealistic. Twenty-plus years in, they’ve lost none of that righteousness despite feeling like they might be one of the only ones left flying that flag. ‘Self Respect’ is a classic Cribs song on the new album that is centred around a concept that has always driven the band. ‘Self respect will never cash the cheques’ sing the brothers in unison.
“The lyrics are fairly typical Cribs, where it’s a bit sarcastic, but the world has changed, and the whole ethos we used to subscribe to about not selling out and not compromising is a non-issue now,” laments Ryan. “People will do anything to get that bag. You hear that a lot. Everything is fine as long as you’re getting paid. I’m being old-fashioned by sticking to this stuff, but all you’ve got left is your own self-respect. How much does that mean to people now? I don’t know.”
Sometimes the best thing for a band is to just stop being a band and get back to being people. No longer feeling like professional band mates, The Cribs got back to feeling like a band of brothers with a fierce, proud spirit of shared values and deep history that imbued them with a desire to just make the Cribsiest Cribs album they could possibly make. ‘Selling A Vibe’ feels like a band reinvigorated.
“By the time we did start writing songs we were all on the same page and boiling stuff down to its most essential elements. We were getting out of the way of the songs and not overworking them. We used to have this philosophy that if something isn’t working, you don’t pursue it. If we’re not in the right headspace, we don’t try writing, but once the tap is on, you drop everything and stick with it until it runs dry,” says Ryan passionately. “We know who we are and our self-awareness of our strengths and what’s good about the band is at the forefront of our minds,” concludes Gary. “I think it’s the most cohesive, focused and leanest Cribs album. It’s really refined. I think it’s our best record.”
Taken from the February 2026 issue of Dork. The Cribs’ album ‘Selling A Vibe’ is out now.
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