Check Masses release their debut single ‘Dripn Angel’, via Triassic Tusk Records.

The trio – Vic Galloway, Saleem Andrew McGroarty and ‘Philly’ Angelo Collins – are all well-kent faces on the Edinburgh and wider Scottish music scene.

Saleem Andrew McGroarty, aka Andy, also goes under the production monicker Sound Signals, and has been part of Edinburgh’s nightlife for years, starting the capital’s first hip-hop club The Big Payback with Neil Spence in 1990, and playing at some of the city’s seminal clubs, including Lizard Lounge and Chocolate City. He also featured on Sugar Bullet’s, ‘Demonstrate In Mass (One Nation Under A Dope Mix)’, regarded as the first ever recorded Scottish hip-hop track. He currently produces under the name .

Galloway, similarly, has many guises – a BBC TV and radio presenter as well as a writer, having authored the 2018 book ‘Rip It Up’- The Story of Scottish Pop, as well as ‘Songs in the Key of Fife’, a first-hand account of the East Neuk’s musical history, informed by his time playing in bands with James Yorkston and King Creosote as a key member of the Fence Collective. However, many will remember him best as a former writer for is this music? magazine

Seychelles-born Collins, vocalist and lyricist for the trio, has been based in Scotland since his childhood, and following playing in various bands in the 1990s including a spell signed to EMI, released an album, Kings and Queens’, in conjunction with producer McGroarty and taken from his major label sessions.

‘Dripn Angel’, available now to stream or download, is the first song the band wrote, and of the track, Collins said: “The woman in the song is the Devil… I’d recently rewatched Angel Heart and was trying to get the atmosphere/desperation and the futility of making a deal with the Devil come alive in song.

“The blues come from the darkest part of a man’s heart, and trust me it’s all heart.”

Next show for the band is on 31st January at the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh.

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