You know the Goat Girl story by now: four musicians met because they all went to the same gigs together. They shared lashings of political anger, wrote loads of songs, played a tonne of shows, and got picked up by Rough Trade.

April’s 40-minute, 19 song debut Goat Girl followed, and it’s one of the most impressive, concise and evocative works of the year; a soft and furious manifesto for giving a fuck, with a healthy smattering of soul-chiming guitar parts and hair-raising vocals. 

The band, made up of Lottie ‘Clottie Cream’ Pendlebury, Rosy ‘Bones’ Jones, Naima ‘Jelly’ Bock and Ellie ‘L.E.D’ Rose Davies, are currently in the middle of their festival rounds, bringing drooling, garage-pop out from The Windmill and into the light of day. 

We spoke to Ellie ahead of their set at Citadel this weekend, and she agrees that their sound “suits that dingy, dark venue”  better than a bright stage in the glare of the daylight sun, which “can be quite weird sometimes.” 

At a festival in France recently, the band couldn’t help but feel as though they “didn’t really fit” among the hip-hop and pop acts, let alone in the sunny surroundings. Set to be a scorcher, Citadel will provide a similar backdrop, as well as another line-up of genre bends: psych-gods Tame Impala will headline alongside synth-popsters Chvrches and jazz supergroup R+R=NOW. 

More conceptual in the dark, but no less compelling out of it, Goat Girl’s set at Citadel will be unmissable. And at least at this festival they’ll know some of the other bands on the bill: namely, Shame and Fat White Family, who exist with Goat Girl in a kind of enclave that the press has invented for them.

By performing primarily in South London venues such as Brixton’s Windmill, these bands (as well as scuzz-popsters Sorry and math-rockers Black Midi) soon came to be known as part of a scene. A scene that perhaps doesn’t exist to quite the crescendo it’s made out to by journalists. “I don’t mind; it’s fine really…but I think that writers kind of group us as a South London scene because it’s the easiest thing to do.”

Another line they’ve come to live under is that of the ‘DIY Band’, which, Ellie says, isn’t quite accurate either: “there’s definitely a DIY ethos…but bands that are actually DIY do everything themselves and have financially paved the way for themselves. I think it would be wrong to say we’re DIY because of the amount of help we’ve had.” 

The help that Ellie’s referring to comes, of course, from Rough Trade, who they signed with on Brexit Day (June 24, 2016) “less than a year” after the then-teenagers started playing at The Windmill.

Goat Girl went for their fair share of meetings with interested labels, but it’s Rough Trade they went with, partly because of “their ethos”, partly because of their roster (“we really like The Strokes and Princess Nokia”), and, in large part, “because a lot of the other labels were predominantly male-run.” 

Choosing a label because of “how many women were there” in its office is an important political choice to make, but it’s also a personal one. As will be abundantly clear to those of you who have listened to the album, Goat Girl are a band whose music, lyrics and purpose are rooted in political fury. 

“That anger comes from being teenagers who felt trapped at school, getting detentions for going to protests on tuition fees and getting angry about gender inequalities” Ellie says of the vitriol that spouts spectacularly forth at Goat Girl’s live shows. 

To translate their live sound onto record, the band used tape to “put down the bare bones [of the album] and rehearsed loads before going into the studio. It was Dan’s [Carey] idea to record songs in groups of three or four…we went through it like a live set. Then the more melancholy, mellow parts were added in afterwards, like the synth and the omnichord and the interludes.” 

The result is a concise album devoid of “lengthy, wanky guitar solos” and instead filled with precise, chilling tracks alive with the spectre of guitar music and the spirit of punk. One such track is ‘Viper Fish’, written about “how humans are fucking the planet, and about the treacherous things - especially as white people - that we’ve done to the world.” It’s a creeping, chanting triumph that evokes misty nights spent in urgent whispers with fellow insurgents. But it’ll sound just as good out in the sun. 

Catch Goat Girl live on Sunday at Citadel, where they play the Clash & Last.FM stage.