Crawlers: “It’s healing to stand onstage and see kids taking in all our vulnerable moments”

Some people just have it. Proof, if needed, that Holly Minto is one of them, came at the tender age of six, when they wrote their first song, the not-at-all-concerningly-titled You Put The Devil Inside Of Me.

“We found a video of [me performing] it the other day,” Holly tells us, seemingly half-lolling and half-wincing at the memory. “I was wearing these massive bunny ears and a tutu, and when I opened my mouth to sing, I sounded like [late jazz icon] Sarah Vaughan. Most parents, if their child wrote a song called that, they would put them in therapy. Luckily, my mum is a therapist, so she saved as much money as she could to put me into all things musical instead.”

This explains a lot. Although these dreams of stardom started young, it was the lure of the stage as an actor where destiny seemed like it might call. Today, Holly – who uses they/them pronouns – is speaking to Kerrang! as the guitarist and singer in one of the country’s brightest alternative music prospects Crawlers, whose brilliant debut, The Mess We Seem To Make, hit the Top 10 of the UK’s Official Albums Chart in February.

From the outside looking in, it has been a steep and rapid rise for the quartet, completed by bassist Liv May, guitarist Amy Woodall and drummer Harry Breen. Crediting that success solely to the 2021 viral TikTok smash of their song Come Over (Again) would be to diminish the preceding years of hard graft, hustle and struggles that were endured on the way up. And the tale of how Holly ended up here is almost as tangled.

“My musical journey’s a bit rogue,” they acknowledge. “There were so many pivotal moments in my life that didn’t seem that big a deal at the time, but reflecting back now, I can see they were turning points.”

One early catalyst was another childhood memory – most likely a conflation of several – in the family car en route to a campsite somewhere in the UK. It was Holly, their mum, dad, older brother and younger sister all squeezed in with backpacks on their laps. The middle child fondly remembers playing their Game Boy and begging to hear Black Holes And Revelations again and again. Not that Holly had a clue who Muse were or why they liked that particular CD so much. They just knew and loved every word, singing along as the road opened up before them. “Those holidays seemed so magical,” they say with a beaming smile.

Although nobody in the family circle played an instrument, Holly’s education was solid as music was always present in the Minto household.

“Mum was a goth and dad was a punk,” they explain, “so they were subconscious enjoyments for me.”

Indeed, they cite The Damned, Kate Bush and The Cure as artists who inadvertently soundtracked those carefree days growing up in the Southport suburbs.

In an effort to explore their burgeoning talents and find an outlet for a seemingly boundless reserve of energy, Holly took lessons in singing, bassoon, violin, trumpet, ukulele, judo and drama.

“I just oozed music,” they say. “I sang when I was walking everywhere. I hadn’t even realised yet how important all of this was. I wasn’t thinking of being in a band; it was all just begging for an outlet.”

In Year 9 came an epiphany. Overhearing some “cool” girls in school cooing over Bring Me The Horizon – words that meant nothing to Holly’s “uncool” 14-year-old ears – they decided to find out what all the fuss was about. Borrowing a friend’s handset that night, the jazz and classical enthusiast hid under their duvet and ventured down a rabbit hole. There, they discovered All Time Low and Vic Fuentes on A Love Like War; My Chemical Romance’s The Ghost Of You introduced itself as their new favourite song; Thnks Fr Th Mmrs by Fall Out Boy came next; and finally, Diamonds Aren’t Forever by Bring Me The Horizon. In those songs, life was forever changed.

“I lay there blushing!” they recall. “For the first time, I felt understood. I think that moment, under the duvet, is the reason we’re an alternative band now. That was the first time I felt like music could transcend, could be a community and this whole other experience.”

In the years that followed that musical eureka, the complexities of life revealed themselves in both darker hues and colourful possibilities. At the age of 16, Holly was finally diagnosed with ADHD, which helped explain much of what had previously eluded reason. It accounted for why they were considered a “problem child” in primary school. It went a long way towards explaining why they signed up to 10 different choirs, joined any club that would have them, and threw themselves into every extracurricular activity possible.

“I was such a joyous kid,” Holly insists. “But when you’re a struggling, undiagnosed teenager who’s getting bullied, you’re looking for an escape. I didn’t really fit in until I found this community that seemed to have an amazing soundtrack. It was something I hadn’t heard before. The sense of community was the biggest thing. These artists were saying everything that I was thinking into this darkness.”

Alongside an evergreen love of comics, cosplay and gaming, Holly had at least – and at last – found their tribe. In that search for identity, they happened upon a safe space where they felt seen for the first time, even if a lot of the meaningful bonds were forged online via Tumblr and fanfiction communities.

There were good times IRL, too, hanging out in parks with pals, listening to YouTube, drinking Monster Energy and playing House Of Gold by twenty one pilots on a mustachio-emblazoned ukulele. One time, in school, someone played the G note (you know, the one that opens that My Chem song…) on the piano and everyone freaked out.

“When we found this new community of music we all jumped straight in,” they reminisce. “It was another place for us to hibernate in our chronic online and offline worlds.”

The purity of that period, however, didn’t last. No sooner had Holly settled into a place of comfort within their own skin that they started to rebel.

“Something changed between sixth form and uni,” they confess. “I envy my high school self a lot, because I didn’t give a fuck how uncool I was [then]. But there was a moment where I lost it. I became insecure and I don’t know why. I jumped back into the closet, tried to fit in with other people and got into bad relationships. I tried anything to be ‘cool’.”

As toxic relationships with boys who pooh-poohed their passions shot their self-esteem to bits, Holly stopped gaming and turned their back on alternative music. The kid who used to love comic conventions and supplied fanfiction for English assignments tried to become someone else for a while, and naturally, it made them miserable. Then came another turning point.

“I auditioned for a theatre course, didn’t get in and felt like my whole life had crashed before my eyes,” they say. “I thought I had been working my entire life to be an actor. My mum had never seen me cry like that before, so she applied for what she thought was a similar course at LIPA [Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts], but it was for popular music. That turned out to be the best mistake of my life. I went in with a ukulele and a dream, and everything changed (laughs).”

It was at LIPA where Holly met Liv, and the rest became recent history. The two were serendipitously paired together in a rock band and it wasn’t long before Holly realised that all of those songs they had been writing for fun “could be a thing, like a job” for the first time. From there, an obsession grew as whole days were lost to writing and playing before recruiting Amy, and eventually Harry, to the cause.

Practicing in a shed in Warrington turned into first gigs on the local circuit, and realisations that two songs and some Led Zep covers weren’t going to cut it. While the rest of the band brought Foo Fighters and Queens Of The Stone Age love to the table, Holly sought inspiration from the Liverpool scene and dreamed of maybe one day being able to charge 50 people £7 on the door to come see them play, too. All the while, they were refining their craft, homing in on the band’s aesthetic, playing as a session trumpeter and even co-writing a political concept album about China with a friend.

As momentum started to gather pace around Crawlers, however, the pandemic stopped everything. Again, it might have been just the intervention they didn’t even realise they needed.

“In lockdown,” Holly says, “all I had was a guitar my dad gave me years ago that I didn’t really know how to play. So, I sat and wrote my feelings. I’d gone through a really shitty break-up and a literal psychotic break. Mentally, I was very much in the dumps using my guitar as an outlet. This was the first time I’d connected to it in a writing way, but now with the knowledge of being in a band. That was the big transition to being where we are now.”

Where they are now feels a long way away from those dark days, diarised with raw, unflinching honesty on the band’s major label debut. The journey from there to here has since taken them around the country, across the States, to blowing up online and even opening for My Chemical Romance, far exceeding the modest hopes and dreams first imagined only a few short years ago. Musical theatre might not have been meant for Holly in the end, but the stage’s loss is very much the rock world’s gain. Having had one dream already snatched away from them, the 24-year-old isn’t prepared to leave Crawlers’ fate to chance. This time, they’re taking charge.

“I am tired of blind faith now,” they stress. “You can believe in what you have, but being able to meticulously plan, strategise, and at the core of that [have] the music, is how we grow. Me getting into music and what happened with Come Over…, a lot of that was luck. But behind the scenes of all that luck was hard fucking work.”

With a summer of shows ahead supporting Royal Blood and hitting the stages of festivals including 2000trees and Reading & Leeds, the more successful Crawlers become the more work there will to be done. That rock won’t push itself up the hill, but Holly might need some help along the way. Lend a hand, won’t you?

“When I stand up onstage and I see kids taking in all our vulnerable moments it’s healing for me,” they enthuse. “It has made me realise that I’m safe in this community that we’ve helped harness. It makes me feel like I’m regressing back to everything I was from the age of 16 to 21.

“I feel like I’m finally back to being me.”

Crawlers play through the summer, including 2000trees on July 12 – get your tickets here. This article originally appeared in the summer print issue of the magazine.

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