‘I dressed up especially for the interview,’ joked The Covasettes frontman Chris Buxton as he appeared on Zoom wearing a suit; a far cry from his on-stage look.
It turns out, despite nearly 50,000 monthly Spotify listeners, growing popularity, and their debut album on the way, Chris revealed he is still working as a solicitor.
In fact, The Covasettes — made up of Chris, Jamie McIntyre, Matt Hewlett, and Matt Buckley — all have ‘peasant jobs’ by day.
‘It’s not the most seamless of transitions,’ the singer admitted to Metro ahead of their album announcement. ‘I don’t think it’s the coolest look in the world.’
With grassroots venues closing at an alarming rate, opportunities for artists to make a living without becoming global megastars are dwindling.
‘We’ve all quit jobs or lost jobs over the band,’ Chris admitted, before adding that relationships have also been collateral damage in the 10 years since they formed.
The Covasettes recently toured with The Lottery Winners and The Zutons, with their gigs taking them all across the UK, including festivals like Kendal Calling.
Touring is not so easy when your client has a court date.
‘We manage it, but it’s difficult,’ Chris explained. ‘It means we spend all our evenings in the band and all our daytimes working.
‘I think a lot of elements of your life do suffer, but because we love it, we give up so much for it. We do it because we believe in what we’re doing.’
After almost a decade of grafting, The Covasettes’ debut album, Honeymoon Forever, is set for release on April 10, 2026, with lead single Such A Dream out on August 29.
The group have seen their popularity grow thanks to singles such as Rebound, Love in Polaroid, and Be Mine — which has over 3,000,000 streams on Spotify alone.
Chris shared: ‘It feels so weird because we’ve been going for eight years now, and all the music we produced ourselves in Jamie’s basement, as we’ve never had a record deal.
‘It’s been such a gradual climb, watching the numbers go up. It’s nice to be recognised as a band who are now sort of making waves or has some pull to them.’
While they may be drawing in bigger crowds and have a Record Store Top 10 under their belts with 2023’s EP What’s Lost Is Ours To Find, Chris still struggles with imposter syndrome.
‘I’m getting used to it,’ he told us in a rare moment of earnest amid his jokes. ‘In my head, to some extent, we’re no bigger than we were eight years ago.’
He has adopted a ‘fake it till you make it’ approach, which involves ‘buying some more expensive jackets, and hoping that you do all right.’
‘Try and get a good-looking girlfriend,’ Chris added with a grin before he admitted he had ‘failed so far.’
The Covasettes were once dubbed ‘the nice guys of indie’, although the band likes to brand themselves more as ‘indie heartthrobs’.
He teased: ‘I’m not saying we’re good looking that way, because I’m not lying, then, am I?’
As any good Gen-Z artist should, The Covasettes had a brief viral moment last year, when their album artwork blew up for featuring a certain farm animal.
‘Our artist Carl Thompson used to always put the odd cow in the artwork,’ Chris recalled. ‘When he sent us a new artwork, there’d be another cow in there.
‘We were like, “Obviously, for now, we have to have cows in every artwork”. We moved artists and put cows in there. I think on our vinyl, there’s something like 60 or 70 cows hidden around the thing.
‘We spent all our tour budget on a giant hanging cow to [put] behind the drums, which all the boys said no to, apart from me.’
The giant cow went down a treat on tour, and now the animal has become the unofficial Covas mascot, with cow socks for sale on their website.
Fans have even got tattoos of the cow, so the band have accepted their fate, although Chris worried it may be a little eager for people to get inked already.
‘If someone gets lyrics of a song, I’m like, “This might not be in a set in a year”,’ he joked. ‘But it’s not about that. It’s about what it means to them.’
The cow isn’t their only brush with fame, though, after their bid for free Colin the Caterpillars also earned some attention from Marks and Spencer’s.
When asked about the stunt, Chris replied: ‘We’re looking like the most Tory band in the world, aren’t we? Let’s be honest, I’m wearing a suit in the interview. It’s not good.
‘I tweeted them hungover, and they came back to us. The next minute, I’m shouting out Colin the Caterpillar on the stage, and then they sent me a box. I reckon it must be worth about a grand.’
The cows and Colins are all born out of their bid to be wholly authentic on social media, abandoning any ‘cool personas’ they tried to affect when the band first started.
‘We’re just idiots,’ he laughed. ‘It was a side of us which I was quite scared to show.
‘You feel like when you first start out, you’ve got to be a certain way, and you’ve got to have black and white images with sunglasses on. There are bands that do it really well. But for us, I just think, maybe our strength is in our uniqueness and our quirks.’
As for their upcoming album, Chris has high hopes to ride that indie sleaze wave into the charts and go full-time with music.
‘I feel like a little bit of guitar music’s coming back. Certain bands are doing well and getting recognition; The Lottery Winners, who we played with, of course, had a number one album.
‘Indie music’s coming back and that works for us, because that’s exactly where we like to sit.’
The Covasette’s debut album Honeymoon Forever is out on April 10, 2026, with the new single Such A Dream out on August 29, 2025. It is available to pre-save now.
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