Aerial Salad Return With New Single “L.A.” & Announce “Roi De L’Herb” EP

Following on from last years R.O.I. album, Manchester, UK’s Aerial Salad are set to return to the fray with a brand new five track EP, Roi De L’Herb, that is set to be released on June 27th on 12” vinyl and through digital platforms via Venn Records. Having released their Dirt Mall album during lockdown, which was a pretty grim time to put an album out, the release still eventually opened up some exciting doors for the band and captured Aerial Salad at their most Aerial Salad; loud, brash, silly and emotive. This led swiftly to 2024’s R.O.I. album that marked a real evolution in the band’s sound and songwriting. This brings us crashing into 2025, no longer in the same line of spirit destroying work, with some seriously exciting gigs on the horizon, Aerial Salad wanted to kick off the next era of the band with a short, fast and hard EP and have served up five new tracks that sit somewhere between Dirt Mall and R.O.I.

“R.O.I. is a concept album but rather than being about a band, it’s from the perspective of an individual pushed to the brink of insanity by the ever-present quest from commercial success. The idea came from my job; I’ve been working in the tech industry in ‘sales’. ‘Return on investment’ was probably my most uttered phrase for a few years, I was sick of it, sick of having no positive impact on the world and sick of the tech bro, double espresso, thirsty thursdays, work hard – playhard bollocks culture that comes with it. ‘R.O.I.’ is me saying ‘know what, you can actually earn a lot of money in life, even without the fallacy of educational infostructure and financial privilege, however, it comes at a cost of your soul, time and energy. ‘R.O.I.’ is called such because it’s in the opposite pursuit, it’s not about a return on a financial investment, it’s about doing something with your life that’s enjoyable.” (singer and guitarist Jamie Munro)

The EP is called Roi De L’Herb because of the track King Of The Grass that is about the band’s bassist Mike Wimbo who works for Rochdale Council on the greens team, which means he spends his life in the pouring rain chopping down overgrown hedges and mowing lawns. Elsewhere on the EP, Inject Your Blood is another romantic love song inspired by the TV series True Blood, Wires rages against the world of AI and GPT, whilst the EP’s opening track My Girl is a chaotic, high energy catchy punk song, nothing profound, nothing complicated. It’s a punk song as god intended, a few chords and a load of shouting. Listeners get their initial flavour of the EP this week with the track L.A. which finds Aerial Salad in a rare romantic mood. 

“We’ve not done a love song in time, classic bit of love song lyrics about wearing your partners skin and crawling inside their hearts. We’ve (very loosely) called ourselves a ‘Madchester punk band’ (because we like the Mondays and the Roses as much as we like Title Fight and Shame) and this is a prime example of that combination of styles. We’ve been a band for a similar amount of time for High Vis, I’m a massive fan, I feel like in terms of Punk/Hardcore/Baggy crossover, they’re The Smiths, profound and jaw dropping, we’re like the Happy Mondays, chaotic and silly. The video was made to be surreal – the song is a frantic expression of the surreal nature of some of humanity’s most powerful emotions. The idea of the bloodied-up running is to visualise the lyric ‘I could crawl inside your beating heart’. We tour and play a lot in France, we’ve played most of our “best” gigs in France, so out of curiosity I wanted to see if the title would translate well, naturally, when the translation contained both “ROI” and l’herbe” – I though, fuck it, that’s about as spot on a title for this EP as we can possibly muster. The EP is like the teaser for what’s next, the overall hook for this EP is one of hope, that by sticking to what you believe in you can do anything.” (Jamie Munro)