Introducing The Bush: Uniting punk-disco with ‘Meet Me In The Bathroom’
It is often said that, in the modern realm of music, the average person has access to millions of songs at their fingertips, but the nature of the algorithms which dictate the thinly-veiled evil of those music streaming sites means it’s annoyingly easy to listen to the same 50 songs that you have been listening to for the past decade without discovering anything new.
There are, however, certain corners of the internet that still prioritise music discovery, and Bandcamp is arguably the greatest. The closest that the digital age has ever come to replicating a proper record store in pixel form, you can easily wile away an entire day scouring the depths of Bandcamp in search of exciting independent music from across the globe, which is exactly how, in late 2025, I came across a mysterious new group by the name of The Bush.
With one white-label seven-inch to their name, and an intriguing lack of information about the actual band, I was certainly not expecting to be so immediately engrossed by their track ‘Smack’. Nevertheless, as soon as its three-and-a-half-minute runtime was out, I was hooked on their unique, genre-defying blend of punk attitude and disco-funk grooves, existing somewhere between CBGBs, Studio 54, the Meet Me In The Bathroom scene, and the group’s apparent origins in modern-day London.
After purchasing the self-released seven-inch vinyl attached to the release, and playing it to death, my obsession with the infectious groove of the track turned to intrigue over the band itself: Who are these mysterious Bush people who seem to have arrived out of nowhere? And when will they follow up on this post-punk-funk excellence?
“Eric [Cooke] and I have known each other through music for over a decade,” Steffen Wagner later explained to me of the duo’s partnership. Explaining how they came together to forge The Bush, the songwriter continued, “Back around 2010, we were both part of what people call the first – maybe second – retro soul wave. Eric was in Myron & E, and I was working with Gizelle Smith & The Mighty Mocambos on their first record.”
“We knew of each other back then, but properly connected a few years later when Eric got in touch with my brother about producing his solo album,” Wagner added. With their respective influences and reams of experience in the realm of songwriting and production, it was only a matter of time before the pair collided in a creative sense when they both found themselves in London.
“We are at this stage deep into soul, deep funk, groove-based music, the cooler end of disco,” Wagner explained of their eclectic pool of influences. “Eric is especially big on boogie, and both of us actually came from hip hop before any of that.”
Despite bonding in the mid-2010s, though, it wasn’t until fairly recently that the pair actually began working together. “After I moved back from New York in early 2023, we started hanging out more again,” the producer remembered. “We’ve both lived on both sides of the Atlantic, so we had that shared perspective – especially after the last few chaotic years globally. That bond deepened.”
Eventually, that bond morphed into The Bush, with the trigger for the group being a fascination with the Meet Me In The Bathroom indie scene of the early 2000s. “The actual spark for The Bush came after watching the documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom,” he said. “Seeing the early New York scene – bands like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes, and especially LCD Soundsystem – it hit something.”
“When I moved to the UK in the early 2000s, I was deep into hip hop and funk, but I was surrounded by indie and punk bands again,” Wagner went on. “I’d occasionally get involved, but I never thought that would be my path anymore. Until that moment, after the cinema. The next day I was in the pub after football and thought – why not connect our groove background with that raw energy?”
This, as it turns out, was when The Bush was born. “I half-jokingly texted Eric, saying we should start a disco-punk band. He just replied: ‘Let’s do it. Call it The Bush.’ We’d just watched the film in Shepherd’s Bush, so the name stuck.”
So, the duo had a name, but no material to attach that name to. “A few days later, we were in the studio – I laid down the verse beat and bassline almost instinctively,” Wagner recalled. “We mapped it out, saying, ‘This needs a bridge… then the chorus just explodes – distorted, shouty, punk.’” Seemingly, the pair acted quick, imbuing their work with the kind of ‘live fast, die young’ attitude that dominated the New York indie scene that brought them together.
“The essence came together very organically,” he added. “Finishing it took longer – we recorded the chorus and the bridge with a punk band [unnamed] a friend was playing in at the time – but the core idea was immediate.” By the time the track was finished, it was evident that The Bush couldn’t simply stop there: “We realised this could be genuinely quite a cool style and connect two worlds that rarely overlap – groove, funk, hip hop and disco culture and indie/punk culture.”
With that genre-defying sound that had lured me in so expertly while surfing the digital airwaves of Bandcamp, the duo took the plunge to commit their recording to physical media, in the form of an unsuspecting white-label vinyl single. “No big aesthetic push,” Wagner explained. “Just: does the music stand on its own? In our world, that’s how you test something, or used to anyway.”
“Blending genres sounds simple, but it’s actually difficult to do without being formulaic,” he went on to explain, offering some insight into the inner workings of the pairing. “We’re not trying to just paste disco over punk. Sometimes the punk reference is more dance-punk like LCD, sometimes it leans new wave synth.” Adding, “There’s groove, there might be hip hop elements. It’s evolving naturally.”
In the spirit of the anarchic spirit the band channel on ‘Smack’, though, the single isn’t merely an experiment in genre. “Without getting too political,” Wagner shared, “The Bush stands for unity and against division. I hate how divided the world is these days. People are so at each other’s throats. I know that no record in the world will change that…but it’s still a core belief behind our music.”
“This marketing approach of breaking everything into little categories is pretty unnatural and certainly causes artists a lot of grief,” he continued. “Not even just talking music here, I think it has contributed to a lot of the problems our societies face.” In essence, then, The Bush are aiming to break those divisions both in music and in a wider sense, too.
It’s certainly a lot of pressure to stake on one singular seven-inch, but if there were ever a track strong enough to support that weight, then it might just be ‘Smack’. In a music scene which is constantly repackaging and re-selling the same product over and over again, the expansive, defiant sound contained within that track has real power, whether it is to break down those aforementioned divisions of scenes and genres or simply to get people moving to something they might never have heard before.
Keeping the energy up, a follow-up single and full EP are reportedly in the works for the pair, but given the sound of ‘Smack’, there aren’t many guarantees to be made about exactly what those future tracks will sound like – then again, that unknown is part of the excitement building around Wagner and Cooke.
“Ultimately, The Bush is about connecting different people through a sound they may gravitate to or be able to relate to. I hope they will. I would love to see that,” Wagner concluded, providing a great sense of promise for the future of this once-mysterious transatlantic punk-funk duo. Reserve your seat now, or risk missing the boat.
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