Moletrap are back with “Chicken,” the latest single from their forthcoming EP ‘Mid Welsh Pt. 2,’ and it arrives as one of their most charged and rooted releases yet. The Mid Wales and Bristol-based alternative rock trio wrote the track as a direct response to the commodification of their home region, weaving nostalgia for teenage years fishing in local reservoirs with sloganeering, protest imagery and local folklore of the lakes as portals of the Tylwyth Teg, the fairy folk of Welsh tradition, to untouched paradise gardens. “We’re rallying against the creeping capitalist takeover of Mid Wales that we all increasingly feel,” the band says, invoking the tradition of iconic Welsh red murals honouring lost communities and hinting that a new one may yet be needed: “Cofiwch Canol Cymru.”
The single follows ‘Mid Welsh Pt. 1,’ a five-song EP rooted in what it means to be Mid-Walian, and a string of singles that earned the band support from BBC 6 Music, BBC Radio Wales, BBC Introducing (who called their music “un-ignorably great, a thousand mosh-pits await”), BBC Horizons/Gorwelion, Clash Magazine and more. Singing in both Welsh and English, Moletrap have built their sound around the history, folklore, people and wild landscape of the Cambrian Mountains, aiming, as they put it, to sound like those mountains rumbling and crashing. “Chicken” is out now on all streaming platforms, with ‘Mid Welsh Pt. 2’ to follow.