Plymouth’s PLAYWRITER swap ambient laptops for lively, tactile dream‑pop on debut Everyday EP
Plymouth indie dream-pop four-piece Playwriter release their debut EP Everyday this week and head to Exeter's 12 Bar Music & Social Saturday (Jan 24), moving on from their ambient music backgrounds and embracing the warmth and immediacy of a live band built around human connection, humour and grown-up honesty.
“Me and Tom were making ambient music on our laptops, remotely,” says lead singer Leo Cunningham. “Then one day I picked my Fender Mustang off the wall and realised how much I missed getting together with other players and doing it that way. Tom felt the same, so we started a band.”
That move from solitary sound-design to shared songcraft shapes the Everyday EP at every level. Written firmly from a 30‑something vantage point, its songs sparkle with wit and a zen attitude to life. They examine adult friendshipand that nagging feeling that you are older and supposedly wiser, but still don’t know what it all means – all expressed through the irresistible prism of dreamy retro indie pop.
Opener “Still There” treats anxiety not as some big reveal but as something you gradually learn to live with; “Melt” comically shrugs that things might be bad right now, at least you are not literally melting. “Me and You” plays like a love letter to a best friend you rarely speak to but easily fall back in step with the instant you get together.
“These songs are about maturing,” Cunningham says, “embracing being in your 30s and answering these philosophical questions in a grown up way.”
Musically, Playwriter prize tone and live feel over electronic perfection, nodding to a more 60s/70s-leaning, laid-back psych-pop glow without slipping into pastiche. The EP was recorded live with minimal overdubs, capturing guitars, keys, bass and drums breathing in the same space rather than constructed layer‑by‑layer to an impersonal click.
After years lost in synths, Cunningham fell back in love with his old Fender Mustang and the particular creaks and squeaks of fingers on strings. “It’s tactile – you can’t beat it,” he says. “It’s part of what makes Playwriter so alive – we’re all about human connection.”
Even the artwork keeps things refreshingly real. Shot on a point‑and‑shoot film camera in Beaumont Park near Cunningham’s Plymouth home, it captures local pigeons mid‑flight – quotidian and ordinary, yet strangely uplifting, it neatly expresses the way these songs find beauty in the every day. “My partner and I adore pigeons,” he says. “They’re so polite.”
Alongside Playwriter’s own live shows, Cunningham is putting his energy into Plymouth’s wider grassroots ecosystem with his DIY night Sweet Jeans, designed to pull the city’s creative pockets closer together. Recent nights have brought local bands and touring up‑and‑comers into the same small rooms, hinting at the beginnings of a scene where Playwriter aren’t “just another new band” and more part of Plymouth musician renaissance.
“It’s so important we strive to keep live music alive.”
SEE PLAYWRITER LIVE:
24 January 2026 – 12 Bar Music & Social, Exeter TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE
Playwriter – Everyday EP out now:
Listen on Spotify
Bandcamp
Image credit: Cal Baker (Leo vocals, Tom keys, Norman drums, Jon bass)
