Here Come The Bombs, May 2012: first solo single, cube video, post-Supergrass
The drums hit before the vocal settles. Guitar and keys crowd the midrange, and Gaz Coombes sings like someone clearing a room after a long band life. Hot Fruit was the lead single from his debut solo album Here Come The Bombs, released 21 May 2012. The single itself went out on 14 May. After Supergrass went on indefinite hiatus in 2010, this was the public proof that Coombes still wrote hooks, only without the three-piece democracy. He had already road-tested solo material in small rooms before the album street date, watching how Hot Fruit hit without a Supergrass logo on the ticket. The chorus arrives like a habit he refuses to abandon; the verses get noisier than a committee would have allowed.
He produced much of the record himself, stacking guitars, synths, and percussion in home and small-studio setups rather than chasing a big-room Supergrass redo. The lyric leans lusty and slightly unhinged: beauty, heat, and a narrator who will not sit still. Reviews of the album heard Krautrock pulse and psychedelic colour next to the melodic habits he had carried since I Should Coco. Hot Fruit was the radio-facing tip of that mix. The Bombs sessions left room for noise and false endings that a major-label committee might have trimmed; the single kept enough of that edge for daytime play. Interviewers kept asking if Supergrass would return. He kept pointing at the new sleeve as the answer for that year.
Directors dom&nic shot the promo with Coombes trapped in a bright cube in a forest clearing while VFX house MPC built the box and the chaos around it across LA, London, and Bangalore: pills, spin, a stalker figure at the tree line, about twenty-eight CG shots in under three weeks. A lyric video also circulated in April 2012 as DIY and other outlets flagged the single. Live sessions for the Guardian and club dates that spring put the song in rooms that still expected Supergrass choruses and got a denser solo palette instead. Festivals and UK headline dates in 2012 used Hot Fruit as an early-set jolt: same instinct for a hook, different permission to get weird before it lands.
I wanted to make a record that felt free, where I could follow every idea without waiting for a band vote.
(Gaz Coombes, on starting the solo albums around Here Come The Bombs)
The track did not need to be a stadium anthem to matter. It told listeners the Supergrass frontman had a second catalogue coming, one he would keep expanding through Matador and later records. Play it at the top of Here Come The Bombs again and the message is plain: new name on the sleeve, same instinct for a chorus, different permission to get weird in the verses. Press play for the cube video’s first spin alone, then stay for how cleanly the hook survives the noise around it.
