“In an alternate universe: the group Prep released their debut album on September 12th, 1979, featuring their hit song, As It Was. It reached #1 and stayed there from November 1979 to March 1980 and was released as a single in June 1980. Harry Styles covered the song in 1987 and was remixed in 2022 for a modern-day mix.”

You can’t say fans of Prep aren’t imaginative, or passionate, or dedicated. And committed – to the extent of 19 million YouTube views, 50 million Spotify streams, and 5.8 billion views and 1.6 million TikTok creations for the London four-piece’s cover of As It Was, Harry Styles’ game-changing 2022 single.

But no surprise there. Theirs is a sound, finessed over two albums, four EPs and an upcoming new EP, that’s so unlike any of their UK peers that it’s made Prep (formed in 2015 when Tom, Llywelyn, Guillaume and Dan came together via various connections and friendships on the London music scene) into arena-scale outliers in multiple countries across the world.

10 years into their existence, and as proven on their exquisite albums Prep (2020) and The Programme (2024), what’s undeniable is the band’s intuitive understanding of, and love for, the DNA of timeless, boundary-less songcraft. Of warm, intimate, simpatico production, and how to make that resonate in the Spotify world. Of how to combine something as elusive as the “vibe” of 1970s jazz and West Coast US rock and soul, with something as precise as 1980s studio techniques, with something as geo-particular as Japanese City Pop, with something as totally, uniquely London and contemporary as their new EP One Day in the Sun.

Nowhere is that more obvious than on the title track. Complete with finger-popping beat and soaring saxophone, it feels simultaneously like a great lost track from Peak MTV 1985 and a New Music Friday banger from autumn 2025. One Day in the Sun is a moebius strip of perfect shiny pop.

“That's really what we're trying to do with everything,” says Llywelyn. “Take some of the shapes and moods of these earlier generations of music we all love, but rework them into something that we’ve never heard.”

This, then, is a four-track EP recorded and produced by the band in East Ham and Haringey, but that brims with music reaching across the hemispheres and eras. In one direction, American soul and jazz from half a century ago. In the other, the very modern fandom of Taiwanese megastars Sunset Rollercoaster, Prep’s collaborators on opening track Do What You Gotta Do. All in all, a refreshing and refining of that singular Prep sound.

As Dan says: “We get this from our fans all the time: there's no other band like us. Whether that's a good or bad thing, I don't know!”

“I think it’s that outsider perspective on an American sound” concludes Tom. “People who grew up with English weather trying to make LA music. What comes out, inevitably, is something else – but whatever that is, it’s us.”