unpeople are continuing the build towards their debut album with ‘blueprints’, a new single that finds the UK four-piece easing back slightly on the heaviness without sacrificing the size of their choruses.
The track arrives after a busy weekend at Reading & Leeds Festivals and offers another look at ‘we are unpeople’, due October 9 through SharpTone Records. Where previous singles have leaned hard into the band’s heavier instincts, ‘blueprints’ puts four-part harmonies and melody closer to the front.
There is still plenty of weight underneath it. Jake Crawford, Luke Caley, Em Lodge and Richard Rayner have developed a sound that moves between alternative rock and metal without sitting particularly comfortably in either camp, pulling together large melodic hooks, early-2000s riffs and sudden changes of direction.
Lyrically, ‘blueprints’ deals with the uncomfortable business of supporting someone whose behaviour is damaging both themselves and the people around them. Luke Caley brought the foundations of the song to the band, including its chorus and melody, before Crawford developed the verses around its central idea.
That balance between melody and heaviness runs throughout ‘we are unpeople’. The album has already produced ‘friends’, ‘clouds’, ‘the garden’ and ‘waste’, gradually revealing the different ends of a sound that can move from accessible alternative rock into considerably heavier territory.
It is a flexibility that has served unpeople particularly well on the road. They have opened for Metallica in Vienna, appeared on bills with Smashing Pumpkins and Coheed & Cambria and drawn sizeable crowds at 2000trees, while appearances at Bloodstock and Kendal Calling have put them in front of two very different festival audiences.
The coming months will keep them busy. Support tours with Royal Blood and Don Broco are ahead before unpeople embark on their biggest UK headline tour to date in January 2027, with a number of dates already sold out. The run concludes at London’s Electric Ballroom on January 28.
For now, ‘blueprints’ provides another piece of the debut album puzzle. Rather than simply making everything heavier, unpeople are beginning to show how much room there is within their sound.
