(Credits: Far Out / Steve Gullick)
Fri 10 April 2026 11:54, UK
“If there are any men with a moustache in attendance, feel free to leave,” remarks Lime Garden frontperson, Chloe Howard. It’s a joke, she quickly concedes, one that lands well in London’s Moth Club as the sold-out crowd is, indeed, heavily moustache-laden. ‘We’re de-centring men’, the comment promises with a smirk.
Lime Garden is at the very end of a small venues tour in the UK, the month before their second album, Maybe Not Tonight, is set to hit the shelves. In the British capital, there’s an air of industry about the room: the four-piece’s debut album, 2024’s One More Thing, showed a formidable grasp of alt-pop hooks and humorous, confessional lyricism, two things that usually sell, and sell well; their follow-up is much anticipated.
So it’s a bold, bolshy choice they make next: they barrel through a few unreleased songs from the upcoming release. The first, ‘Body’, is a painful investigation into body image issues, and the next new song, ‘Cross My Heart’ a convoluted confession of sinning for sin’s sake. When everybody is watching, why put the worst of yourself on display?
Because there is power in our faults, our humanness; there’s real reckoning to be found in true, complicated relationships that will challenge you as much as they will forgive you. It’s a message we all need to hear, and it’s a message that could’ve only ever stemmed from such a girl group who appear to have done all the hard thinking for us.
“All bad parts, that’s what I’ve got”.
For this kind of outward introspection, you have to trust those around you to love and believe in you. At a time when politicians lie about the countries they have bombed, AI spits out facts that are so obviously fiction, and the most commercially successful of our generation have built vapid empires through personal brands selling tummy-tuck propaganda, it’s a tall order, but Lime Garden have cotended with all of this, and turned back to the painfully human to find the answer.
There are telltale signs on Moth Club’s stage: Howard, alongside bassist Tippi Morgan, guitarist Leila Deeley, and drummer Annabel Whittle, have been running laps around the live circuit since as far back as 2017, and you can tell. A smile over the shoulder here, a subconscious two-step there, each instrumental addition crisp and confident, no push and pull but a happy undulation of co-existence and camaraderie.
One More Thing is exactly that: suave synth-pop at once dazzlingly daring and righteously reassured. We’ve got No Doubt and Magdalena Bay, New Order and Mac DeMarco, the fizz of Declan McKenna’s more experimental textures booming into that specific Lime Garden sound, but this time around, it hides even darker secrets.
(Credits: Far Out / Steve Gullick)
“I evaluate, do I even like these mates? You catch my eye just in time… All bad parts, that’s what I’ve got,” they spiral on ‘All Bad Parts’, the weight of self-hatred crushing. Or how about “I hate the way my body looks too, if that helps, but it won’t,” Howard sings on ‘Body’, adding, “I hate the way I’m looking at you, you look so beautiful”. “I’m jealous, and I blame you for it”, Howard admits.
This sort of self-illuminating, self-immolating admission takes guts. It’s the kind of truth that’ll only rear its head after the hard work put into a relationship that makes you feel unashamed for excavating your deepest secrets and insecurities. The outcome? Radical acceptance, love.
In Anahit Behrooz’s 2023 book, BBFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship, Behrooz deems female friendships a foundational pillar of society, as they afford an “expansive and emancipatory understanding of female intimacy”. The transformative power of female friendships, she writes, can be off-putting: “There is something discomforting about their fierceness, their hypersensitivity, their lack of abandon”.
“You have to actually face up to yourself”
Perhaps Lime Garden wrote Maybe Not Tonight with exactly this in mind. Garage-rock guitars and detuned synths, playful textures and expansive, luminous pops of disco-pop shake and shimmer around bold, toxic demarcations: “She’s got the lifestyle, but I think I won…,” Howard presses as an increasing isolation sets in on ‘Lifestyle’. These tormented and twisted lyrics are afforded space because the music behind them untangles the deep-set trauma thinly veiled behind the ideas, and as Howard spirals, her bandmates and their instruments are there to catch her.
These ideas are more familiar to women now than ever before. Increasingly, the patriarchy forces women against women as a way to breed greater subservience, where we turn inwards, away from mutual aid and understanding, a hypersensitivity blunted at the wrong end. We are easier to claim if there is no one around to hear the yells, and Lime Garden couldn’t have tackled this if they weren’t a girl group, a unit who have seemingly been through these exact trials and tribulations together.
In this way, Lime Garden is facing up to some harsh truths through One More Thing. Howard has explained, “Part of the ethos of the record is about addressing, rather than ignoring, all the shitty things you’ve done. You have to actually face up to yourself.”
The night might begin with a joke about moustaches, but it ends with a recentering of the female experience, even if that experience is sometimes nasty, toxic and shameful under the oppressive machine of misogynistic culture. If Lime Garden can find a way into the light, so can you.
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