A Chat with Launch Control (03.09.25)
Joining the musical stylings of Lee Switzer-Woolf (vocals and bass), Alex J Steer (guitar and vocals), and Seb Olward (drums), the UK-based Launch Control brings socio-political punk rock to our ears with an infectiousness where it sticks in your head for days. We speak with Switzer-Woolf about the band’s new album, The Omnipotent Wage, influences, songwriting and more.
OSR: Would it be fair to say your lyrics are very anti-establishment? For example, ‘Coercive Force’ is about police officers who have faced their own allegations. Do you think music with a message is rare these days?
Switzer-Woolf: I don’t think that music with a message is necessarily rare; we come across amazing bands and artists with important messages in their music. I think it’s more a case of these voices not being elevated in the same way as other acts. A political message is not commercially viable in most cases, and it is money that talks in music.
I guess you could say that our lyrics are anti-establishment, but that comes as a by-product of calling out division, exclusionism, prejudice and greed. These are all weaponised and used as means of control by various establishments, but I think we all have to look at each other, and most importantly ourselves, and identify where these ideas are permeating on a personal level too. We’re not just here to ‘government = bad’, we’re looking at society in general and picking apart the reasons we all find ourselves so divided.
OSR: ‘Prospermill’ seems to be about how the government’s handling of the Covid pandemic. What are the band most frustrated with in modern society?
Switzer-Woolf: Yes, ‘Prospermill’ came about from the perfect example of putting profit over people. It was the name of one of the many shell companies set up during the pandemic to make money from supplying PPE equipment that turned out was not fit for purpose. It was a cash grab at the expense of the 250,000 who were dying, and working contrary to everyone who was doing their best to get us through such a tough and scary time.
If you’re asking what we’re most frustrated with in modern society, I think it’s very hard to pinpoint one thing. Certainly, at the moment, the whipping up of hatred and basic radicalisation of the disenfranchised that is aimed towards minorities, immigrants, trans people, etc. The anti-woke rhetoric. It’s endless and it’s incredibly dangerous.
OSR: I love the chorus on ‘Pressipice’: “The journalist is dead / They are ghost writers for rent / Selling hate and buying sex / And we’re the ones who pay for it”. It’s obvious you are wary of what’s written in the press. Are you worried your words might get twisted by the music press?
Switzer-Woolf: Haha, well, I guess we’ll see when you publish this interview, right? I don’t think anyone is going out of their way to twist our words; we’re nobodies! What I’m worried about, and what that song speaks to, is the clickbait dog whistling and parroting of all the terrible discriminatory nonsense mentioned above.
Shout out here to our good friend Dan from Tape It Shut, who pops up for a quick feature in the middle and absolutely kills it. They also have amazing new music out right now!
OSR: The lyrics to ‘Plastic Fruit’ are very intriguing: “Polystyrene teeth crumbling / Biting into plastic fruit”. Would you like to give me some insight into what that song is about?
Switzer-Woolf: So many of our songs are furiously focused on shining a light on bad stuff that is happening, the permeation of greed and distrust and disinformation and prejudice, etc. I wanted to find space on the album with a couple of songs to approach it from a more human angle and speak to the almost drone-like state that we find ourselves living in when we’re trapped by this system. That’s where ‘Plastic Fruit’ and the last song on the album, ‘Everything Is Fine, Stay Calm’, came from.
‘Plastic Fruit’ is about living like a mannequin in a nuclear town. Looking around and feeling like the buildings are cardboard facades, the sky is a projector image, and the fruit is plastic. It’s very different to our other tracks, but it’s one of my favourites on the album.
OSR: What would you say was your approach to songwriting? Obviously, there’s a lot of social consciousness to what you write.
Switzer-Woolf: The approach is almost always lyrics first. Often, we will have discussed what we want to talk about, and then I’ll go away and start to come up with lyrics and a basic structure for the song. Obviously, social consciousness is at the heart of what we’re trying to do, but we’re also conscious of the fact that we don’t want our songs to be too tied down in a way that they become very quickly dated. I’ve talked about ‘Prospermill’, which is talking about the Pandemic, which already feels like a lifetime ago. And we wrote songs about Brexit on an old EP too. That’s always going to happen when there is something we feel very strongly about, but in general, I try to get to the wider root cause of issues rather than being too specific.
OSR: Your music sounds very British, and within it I can hear bits of The Sex Pistols and The Clash. Which artists are your biggest influences?
Switzer-Woolf: The Clash are incredible. I’m not a big Sex Pistols guy. I find some of that early anarchy-for-the-sake-of-it stuff to be a bit thin. It was music of a time period, I guess, and is important for that reason. I’ve been lucky enough to play with TV Smith from The Adverts, who was around in that era, and was way ahead of his time in terms of the social consciousness of his lyrics.
Our influences are more from the 2000s punk rock movement. Bands like NOFX, Bad Religion, etc.
OSR: There are some nice electronic elements on ‘…And While We Were Sleeping The Money Crept In’. Do you like to experiment with synths and the like?
Switzer-Woolf: Absolutely! We’re not very old school punk in that way. We love a bit of technology, and both Alex and I enjoy using synths. I love what they can bring melodically to a song, and Alex is amazing at using them to thicken up a sound in a way that you barely notice they’re present, but you’d miss them if they were gone. Experimentation is important for us in general, and one of the best things about finally putting together a full-length album was having the room to bring in songs like ‘…And while we were sleeping’ that adds another dimension.
OSR: There is a fantastic heavy sound on ‘Warnography’. What type of guitar does Alex like to use?
Switzer-Woolf: Alex uses an Epiphone Les Paul Studio with active iron gear pickups and thick-gauge D’Addario strings. The amp used was his beautiful Hughes and Kettner Tubemiester blended with an STL tones amp sim.
OSR: Have you toured much of the UK? I bet the energy of your music on record is the same at your shows?
Switzer-Woolf: Touring is something we’d love to do. We play a lot of shows locally, where we are very lucky to have an incredible punk rock scene thanks to Reading promoters like Shadow Promos, and we have a twice-annual gig that we put on ourselves called A Punk Rock Outlook. We definitely do our best to bring that energy live, come along and join us in the pit!
OSR: How would you describe your debut album in three words?
Switzer-Woolf: DAMN. THAT’S. GOOD.
OSR: What can we expect from Launch Control in the future?
Switzer-Woolf: We’re going to get out there and start playing these new songs live, which is so exciting. I can’t wait. Then we’ll be working on new music!
OSR: Do you have any message for our readers?
Switzer-Woolf: We just need people to listen to our stuff. Please give it a listen, and if you like what you hear, give us a share around. We have no delusions of grandeur; we just want to get our songs out there to as many people as possible and hope that the messages resonate. And thank you to everyone who’s supported us so far.
Many thanks to Lee Switzer-Woolf for speaking with us. Find out more about Launch Control on their official website, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Spotify.
This artist was discovered via Musosoup #sustainablecurator
