The Mid Wales and Bristol-based alternative rock outfit has unleashed their explosive new single “Chickens”, out now across all major streaming services, and it arrives with the kind of restless energy that feels less like a release and more like a rallying cry. It’s the latest taste of their forthcoming EP Mid Welsh Pt. 2, and it finds the band sharpening their sound into something both melodic and thunderous—pop instinct colliding head-on with heavy guitars and a pulse-quickening urgency.
But beneath the noise is a story that’s deeply rooted in place.
“Chickens,” the band explains, is their response to the creeping commodification of their home in Mid Wales—an increasingly familiar feeling of landscape becoming product, community becoming commodity. Writing the track gave them space to look back, too: to be nostalgic about their teenage years spent playing music together, while simultaneously confronting the modern pressures reshaping the world that raised them. That tension—between memory and encroachment, tenderness and resistance—runs through the song like a live wire.
Lyrically, MOLETRAP paint Mid Wales in vivid, personal snapshots: reflections on fishing trips with their dads at local reservoirs, threaded through with sloganeering and flashes of protest. Then, just as the song threatens to become purely political, it opens into folklore—those same lakes reimagined as portals to the Tylwyth Teg, the fairy folk of Welsh myth, guardians of untouched paradise gardens hidden just beyond reach. It’s a striking blend: the everyday and the mythical, the inherited and the endangered, all held together by the band’s unmistakable intensity.
That sense of identity—lived, bilingual, and unapologetically Welsh—has long been central to MOLETRAP’s appeal. Previous singles like “Rhagofn” and “Middle of the Land” have earned praise for their powerful vocals, crunchy grooves, and lyrics steeped in heritage and the resilience of Mid Wales. Critics have highlighted the band’s ability to explore belonging without romanticising it, pairing dynamic heaviness with melodic clarity and a voice that feels both intimate and confrontational.
And the wider world is listening. BBC Introducing has championed MOLETRAP as “un-ignorably great,” adding: “a thousand mosh-pits await!” With “Chickens,” that prediction feels less like hype and more like a promise.
“Chickens” is out now. Stream it, turn it up, and step into MOLETRAP’s Mid Wales—where protest meets poetry, and folklore still flickers beneath the surface.
Stream ‘Chickens’ Here
https://song.link/gb/i/1845681742
For further information, please visit the following links
Images -MOLETRAP Band by Haydn Ward Streeter –
Chickens Artwork by Lynda McKenna
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