Red Vanilla are a driven bunch, a band on a (long-term) mission who dropped out of school and university to devote their energies and funnel their funds into achieving a dream which had been percolating in singer/guitarist Anna Forsyth’s mind for almost a decade. High on Paramore tour videos, she resolved at the age of 12 to form a band when she was 13. ‘I was on a mission to find band members,’ she says. It took her five years to find her wingman George Weller. In contrast to Forsyth, he was a reluctant music student as a child. ‘I had about six or seven guitar teachers and I really hated it,’ he recalls. ‘I finally got this one teacher who taught me “Times Like These” by Foo Fighters. It was the first song I heard that I really liked and I started to realise that I really love playing.’

Music has been something of a lifesaver for Weller, who has been diagnosed with OCD. At its worst, he struggled to function and shut himself away. ‘The thing that eventually got me to come out was knowing the band are waiting for you and they need their guitarist; so I didn’t do it for me, I did it for the band.’ In a further show of commitment, the four-piece all live together, like a fun boot camp. Drummer Lucas Mander joins Forsyth and Weller, Zooming in from their collective couch (bassist Sam Roberts is indisposed, with a few months still to go before school’s out forever). Forsyth freely admits that many of her lyrics are inspired by the band’s gang mentality. ‘We’re like siblings,’ she says. ‘Nobody else in the world gets how it feels apart from you guys because it’s your little thing. That’s why I started a band in the first place as I wanted that bond with other people.’

Forming just before the pandemic hit, they honed their shoegazey indie-rock skills during lockdown. Inspired by Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell, Forsyth took up guitar to add to their armoury. Debut single ‘Embers’ was released in 2022 after which the band worked on their first seven-track EP Days Of Grey with producer Kieran Smith, who has worked with another of Red Vanilla’s fave raves, Dundonian alt.rockers To Kill Achilles. ‘Dundee’s scene is very varied and we’ve found our niche; it’s very welcoming,’ says Mander.

‘We made the whole EP in Kieran’s home studio using cardboard boxes as vocal booths, but it sounds incredible,’ says Weller. ‘It took me 12 hours to do my guitar parts; it took Lucas ten minutes.’
‘I would like the world to know that I did the whole EP in one take,’ says Mander. ‘Our approach in general is we’re all perfectionists. There are stakes involved. All of our cards are on the table with this EP.’
Red Vanilla: Days Of Grey is self-released on Friday 7 June, and launched at Beat Generator, Dundee, Saturday 6 July.