In Conversation with Creepy Crawly: On Fleeting Summers and “Buttercup”
Creepy Crawly returns with "Buttercup," the first single from the forthcoming album “I Feel It On My Skin,” due June 2026. Produced by Joel Harries, with drums from Felix Harrap and mastered by Stephen Kerrison at Weird Jungle, the track captures the runaway headrush of first love in a midsummer heatwave, the weight of moments that do not yet know they are temporary.
"Buttercup" is sweet and vulnerable without being saccharine or weepy. It takes indie pop as a base and brings in elements of both folk for a more intimate vibe, with a reasonable helping of Britrock influences in the mix.
“I Feel It On My Skin” took shape during a stretch of unstructured time, following songwriter Rachel Cawley's departure from full-time work. That shift, a return to the open-ended days of youth, runs through the record.
We spoke with Rachel about the song, the album that follows, and the unstructured time that shaped it.
First day of unstructured time after leaving the 9-to-5. What did you do, and did any of it make it onto the album?
Day one, I think I probably started the day quite hungover in celebration of that freedom from my desk job! I don’t remember exactly, but I probably had a day of doing absolutely nothing at all in honour of the ability to pause.
The runaway headrush in “Buttercup.” Was it inspired by a specific person or moment, and how do you translate a physical sensation like that into sound?
I was thinking about a bunch of people and experiences—lots of ‘firsts’ that felt thrilling at the time. My first ‘real’ boyfriend, my first cigarette, first time bunking off school, first pill, first time jumping the barriers to take the train to London alone, first time driving my car after passing my test (I drove to a milkshake shop). The obvious translation into sound is a quicker tempo than most of my first album, and the way that the choruses lift from the verse melody. I also found myself inspired by a lot of the music I was just discovering when I was the age of all those ‘firsts’—I had just bought the Rough Trade Shops Indie Pop 1 compilation, and it was full of fuzzy, DIY, super-catchy pop songs (the Vaselines, Spearmint, the Popguns, Sea Urchins, Aberfeldy, the Pastels, etc., etc.) that felt worlds away from the nu-metal that all my friends were into.
The song ends with "This won't last forever," but the album is called “I Feel It On My Skin.” Is that about the ache of fleeting moments or the permanence of how they transform us?
‘This won’t last forever’ is really what I wish I could go back and tell my teenage self—I wish I’d enjoyed it more in the moment. I always felt this desperate rush to grow up faster. Then all of a sudden you realize you are grown up, and you don’t want to be.
The album title ‘I Feel it On My Skin’ relates to a recurring theme in the lyrics of those kinds of sensations—the heat of the sun drying your skin after swimming, the prickly feeling of going bright red with embarrassment, the feeling of holding a tiny animal skull in your hand, the sensation of the air around you being too humid, too claustrophobic.
When you recall those endless teenage summers, is there a smell, taste, or texture that instantly brings you back to them?
Both the smell and the taste of warm cider—I grew up near Bristol, where cider is the local drink, really. Strong, sweet, sticky, and fairly acrid—but also delicious in a sour kind of way. When we were underage, my friend’s older brother would buy us cider from the supermarket if we gave him the money. We’d go out to hang out on top of one of the hillsides in the early afternoon and wouldn’t come back until gone midnight, drunk and stumbling, sliding over in cowpats, and getting ourselves stuck in barbed wire fences.
Do you write to preserve the memory itself or to reignite that original intensity for someone else?
Can I answer ‘both’? It’s both.
How was the studio experience with Joel Harries and Felix Harrap? What did they bring out of your work?
Joel (Harries) is amazing—he produced and mixed my first album, and I just turned up a year later with a bigger pile of songs and said, ‘Let's do this again and make them weirder,’ so that’s what we did. Joel’s musical range goes all the way from his own solo, delicate folk to really noisy post-hardcore-type stuff with his bands Snouting and 72%. I tend to make quite detailed demos with lots of different bits tracked, and he has an amazing ability to take those apart and put them back together again in ways that surprise me (in a good way).
Felix (Harrap) plays drums with me when we play as a full band, and he’s just got a great feel and ability to play exactly what a song needs, but never more than a song needs. Beautiful, understated drumming that holds a song together just enough.
If “I Feel It On My Skin” scored one specific unstructured summer day, what time of day is it, and what are you doing?
It’s mid-afternoon, I’m lying under a willow tree next to a river in the grass, and bugs keep crawling up my limbs and waking me up from my half-sleep. I’m partly in the shade, but my legs are in the sun. I was trying to read a book, but I’m squinting too much from the sunshine, so I’ve given up. I’m thinking about texting someone that I probably shouldn’t. I’m wondering what my best friend from school, whom I lost touch with, is doing in that exact moment.
What’s next up for you?
I’ve got a few gigs planned in Manchester this spring (April 29th at Cafe Blah and May 14th at Mary and Archie's), but I’m hoping to book more of a run in the autumn, after the album has come out (June 6th is the date for that). I’ve been writing and recording some more too—there’s an EP on the horizon for the end of autumn too, made from offcuts that didn’t quite get onto the album tracklisting.