The nerdy truth behind alt-J’s name
When considering nerdy bands, thoughts might stray to old-school tech-innovators, Kraftwerk, or perhaps Radiohead, the British misfits who formed after finding sanctuary in the Abingdon School music room. One of the more modern geeky groups in the modern day is alt-J. While their music isn’t incredibly nerdy, their name, derived from a computer keyboard shortcut, certainly fits the bill.
They formed in 2007 after founding members Joe Newman, Gus Unger-Hamilton, Gwil Sainsbury, and Thom Green met at Leeds University. The group was collated by frontman Newman, who had penned a few tracks and wanted to form a band to give rise to his creative drive.
Under the initial name Daljit Dhaliwal, the band spent a few years building their chemistry alongside a healthy catalogue of songs to play at their formative gigs around Leeds. The sound they gradually shaped between them was derivative of several disparate corners of music thanks to the members’ very disparate backgrounds. To illustrate this, Unger-Hamilton began his musical career as a choirboy at King’s School Ely, while Thom Green is into heavy metal – it doesn’t get much broader than that.
“Our music is different to what we’re all into. We almost shut out our musical background,” Unger-Hamilton once told The Independent. “We didn’t discuss what kind of music we were going to make. I didn’t really know what type of music it was; it felt instinctive.”
During their early rise to prominence, they changed their name from Daljit Dhaliwal to FILMS for a short spell until a case of mistaken identity with US band The Films saw them finally land on alt-J.
“Gwil discovered the alt-J shortcut on his computer, which creates the ‘delta’ symbol, and he thought we should call our band just the delta symbol, which is a triangle in the Greek alphabet,” keyboardist Unger-Hamilton once told FMQB of the name’s origin. “That was kind of our band name, but we chose to pronounce it alt-J because we knew being played on the radio, you need to really give your band a name that is spoken and not just written. So it was going to be said ‘alt-J’ and written like a triangle or a delta. But now the delta symbol remains as sort of a masthead for the band.”
As Unger-Hamilton mentioned, the original aim for the band to be known audibly as alt-J and visually as a delta symbol didn’t quite pan out. The band tends to be introduced on festival lineups and in magazines as “alt-J” to save any confusion among fans and writers, just as we prefer to say and write “Prince” rather than attempting the late pop star’s unpronounceable made-up symbol.
Watch a live studio performance of ‘Breezeblocks’ from alt-J’s 2012 Mercury Prize-winning debut album, An Awesome Wave, below.
