Leeds, now a gentrified patchwork in northern England, wears its post-industrial past on every corner: red-brick terraces pressed up against the cold, grey sprawl of motorway concrete. The 113, named after the city's dialling code, nods to a time when area codes meant more than just numbers. The Hedonist, true to its title, explores the uneasy borderland between tangible and algorithmic, tracing how lives lived via screens and digital endpoints feel restless and split.
The 113's second EP follows 2025's To Combat Regret. Around fifteen minutes and four tracks long, it consolidates a journey which began with singer Jack Grant's bedroom recordings around 2021, before the band settled into a four-piece lineup, blending the boundaries of post-punk, noise rock, and experimentation. Earlier work circled stalled adulthood. Here, The Hedonist shifts the focus to what drives this state in the first place. Grant has said the writing began after watching reels until he felt physically sick at himself, and that nausea is the EP's central feeling.
The Hedonist was mixed by Daniel Fox of Dublin's Gilla Band. His recent production work with Sprints points to a sound that hits the gut hard, with coarse production and regional directness keeping listeners alert throughout. Belfast trio Chalk work similar ground across their Conditions trilogy. The 113 do something adjacent through sheer volume and Grant's working-class cadence, spoken-sung through a fuzzy, post-punk lineage, carrying that sound into their own register. Fans of the drive of Shame, The Fall's spoken-word, and the claustrophobia of Protomartyr will find The 113 firmly among both classic and current voices in this landscape.
Grant has also named Find My Friends and Ring cameras as among the inspirational objects that make 'Scour' bare its teeth as it traces the slow violence that watching inflicts on those whose every response has already been catalogued. 'When I Leave' drops the same critique onto dating apps, where every swipe trains the model that produces the next one, real person or not. This is also the atmospheric space of Olga Ravn's novel The Employees.
Set aboard the spaceship Six-Thousand Ship, that novel explores the lives of both human and humanoid crew members in a purely labor-based environment. The novel explores how relentless routines and hyper-technologized spaces erode the characters' sense of self, leaving them emotionally emptied by mechanical tasks and unremitting surveillance. When one of the humanoid crew members reports that "shopping had a kind of numbing effect on me," she finds that once the shopping stops, what surfaces is sadness. 'Scour' does the same. When there's nothing left to scroll through online, we're left with the reality of our inner monologue… always a scary place to be.
The final track, 'Entertainment,' was written and recorded in a single day and revisits themes introduced in 'Leach,' which opens the EP with parasitic metaphor and queasy anticipation. Grant frames this as a scenario in which robots assume control. From there, the EP closes within a system of extraction in which both the source and the recipient are implicated. Ultimately, the body is left as the sole remnant, marked by malaise.
