Lynks: “Being a queer person – being any person – is complicated. We have moments that are conflicting and challenging”

Lynks is punk, actually. That much became clear when they went out on tour opening for Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes in late 2021. Before that run of shows, they had never felt like punk could be for them, thinking of it as a hypermasculinised space that clings tighter to its own rules than it cares to admit where a queer person like them might not feel welcome. When they saw how much the crowd embraced them, despite their kitschy alt.pop being light years away in sound from the headline act, they realised that the communities in punk were far more open than they first thought.

“Punk is meant to be a cutting-edge genre that’s all about throwing out the rulebooks,” the London-via-Bristol artist considers. “It’s funny, because [in its heyday] it was so cutting-edge, but now the punk genre is no longer necessarily the most punk thing in the most traditional sense. It has quite a strict sound.”

That tour also showed them what else Lynks – a project, or character perhaps, that they tend to speak about like another person – could be. “It was fun to see that there was space for Lynks to be really angry,” they offer as an example. At its genesis, Lynks afforded them the chance to be “a clown”. Their first song as their colourful, gimp-masked alter-ego was titled How To Make A Bechamel Sauce In 10 Steps (With Pictures), which had the hook, ‘Continue adding milk!’ Thanks to that experience, they’ve realised how much more Lynks could be than a fast-talking joker. “Actually, [I can] use it as a vehicle to air out more dark shit,” they say. “The big change with Lynks over time is that it’s gone from something that was almost like a total escape from life, into the purest distillation of my life and emotions.”

As such, debut album ABOMINATION is as fun, loud and quirky as Lynks has always been, but it is also deeply nuanced, and unafraid to get serious. Take its opening track USE IT OR LOSE IT for example – at first, it’s an alt.pop club jam about making the most of being 25 and at one’s physical peak – ‘empirically the hottest year of my whole life’ – but its hedonism is punctuated with a brooding sense of uncertainty that only queer people might experience when they ‘don’t know what it means to be a gay man over age 40 / Unless you’re Ian McKellen or Graham Norton’. Indeed, while conversations about queer joy abound, Lynks wants to talk about ‘queer shame’, because as vital as queer liberation is, life can’t be all Heartstopper and Padam Padam.

“The narratives that we get about being a queer person, even the narratives of queer joy, are so limited,” they explain. “I think we’re getting to this point where there’s this amazing representation of queer celebration, but it does slightly make me feel like if I’m not constantly slaying and sashaying and being fierce, then what the fuck? Being a queer person – being any person – is complicated, and we have moments that are conflicting and challenging and there’s a lot of stickiness.”

Across the album, they’re chipping away at the glossy paint on a variety of well-meaning but problematic ideas and concepts. The seemingly playful LUCKY questions just how fortunate it is to be a queer person in 2024, when not being prosecuted simply for being yourself should have been a given, while I FEEL LIKE SHIT picks holes in the notion that you can paper the cracks in your mental health with bath bombs and sex toys. A large part of it also handles the seedy underbelly of casual sex, such as on (WHAT DID YOU EXPECT FROM) SEX WITH A STRANGER, because while on paper it may be liberating to shag around, it doesn’t eliminate feelings of insecurity or emptiness.

“I think that it can be very isolating in modern culture to have only the celebratory voices tolerated,” Lynks points out. “Most of us, I think, have conflicting feelings about our sex lives. Unless you’re very lucky, most of us have parts of it that we find weird or complicated or create insecurity. In sex positive music and content and stuff you only get half of that. It’s great because it encourages people to feel less shame – I’m an extremely sex positive person but also I’m a fucking human being, I’ve got as complicated a relationship with sex as anyone. But if I was to put out a song that was about full-on sexual liberation, that would feel completely disingenuous, like I’m only telling 15 per cent of the story.”

Elsewhere, Lynks finds themself tackling head-on the stigma religion has perpetuated around queer people. Interlude LEVICITUS:18 contains the infamous ‘You shall not lie with a man as with a woman’ verse from the Bible before they bite back with the title-track, where they declare triumphantly, ‘I put the ass in blasphemy’. And the name of the album is in reference to that same verse, reclaiming a word from a book thousands of years old that has leaked into the foundations of society and entrenched shame and discrimination in it as a result.

“If the Bible didn’t call gay people abominations, how different would so many queer people’s lives have been?” Lynks questions. “I think that faith can be a really good thing for people but I do have so much anger towards religion; I really can’t help it. I just think about how much damage it’s done to people’s lives, how many kids have been kicked out, how many people have killed themselves, it’s horrible. I wanted to use the word ‘abomination’ because if you hear it as a queer person, you know exactly what it’s talking about. I liked the idea of the title of the album being something that would ring differently for queer people.”

But by using that word, Lynks takes back ownership of it. It’s a statement befitting of the album bearing that name, staring shame – and their own, more personal shames – in the eyes. “In the same way a group can reclaim a slur, taking a word like ‘abomination’ that’s created so much horror for so many people and reclaiming it as a badge of honour, it feels powerful to me.”

ABOMINATION is due out on April 12 via Heavenly

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