STONE talk exit from Polydor Records: “FUCK the corps who try and control bands and change their sound”

STONE have spoken out about their exit from Polydor Records, writing: “FUCK the corps who try and control bands and change their sound”.

• READ MORE: STONE: bruising post-punk full of Scouse spirit and soul

The Liverpool band released their debut album ‘Fear Life For A Lifetime’ in 2024 on the major label, but as frontman Fin Power made clear in a lengthy post on X on Friday (May 9), the group felt they were consistently “silenced”, “undermined” and “ignored” by Polydor.

Explaining that the band are now “deep into writing” their second album with a new label and that they are now “fucking happy again”, he said he felt a responsibility to “talk honestly” about their time with Polydor because “some new bands need to hear it” and “because why the fuck would I shy away from speaking our truth”.

Power said that despite having heard the horror stories about major labels, the band were told their vision would be supported and “that promise felt fucking brilliant at the time”. But, he added, “they didn’t mean it”.

Hey Fin here. I posted this on my Personal instagram, thought I should share it here too. STONE will never be controlled and we are more unified now than ever. FUCK the Corps who try and control bands n change their sound. We are back.

This won’t get deleted this time. pic.twitter.com/5fyOkdRSrL

— STONE (@STONELIVERPOOL) May 9, 2025

“I remember after signing, I read about another artist who got completely fucked over by the same label. Their album got shelved. They weren’t allowed to release it independently. They ended up leaving and doing it their way, and now they’ve gone on to win seven BRIT Awards. I remember thinking that won’t be us. We’ve got a vision. We know who we are. We’ll be fine.”

Power was referring to RAYE, who made headlines in 2021 when she left Polydor after claiming they had refused to release her debut album despite having signed a four-album deal with them.

“ALL I CARE ABOUT is the music,” she said at the time. “I’m sick of being slept on and I’m sick of being in pain about it this is not business to me this so personal. I’ve done everything they asked me, I switched genres, I worked 7 days a week, ask anyone in the music game, they know. I’m done being a polite pop star. I want to make my album now, please that is all I want.”

Explaining why the reality at the label was not what he had expected, Power continued: “Within months of signing, everything changed. Every time we brought up making an album, it got brushed off. Like the word album had become dirty. Suddenly, I was being sent off to write with strangers. We were being guilt tripped into TikTok dances. I started questioning every word I wrote. We barely heard from the A and R who signed us. A phone call every few months, if that.”

He said their vlogs with fans were replaced with social media lip syncs and filters, which the band “hated”.

“We were a project. A product. A gamble. And that’s the truth. To most of these companies, artists are just scratch cards. Buy a stack. See which one hits.”

He continued: “We got signed as an alternative rock band and slowly shoved toward pop. We were stuck in an identity crisis. I remember being sent Mix 4 of a song we recorded and thinking, wait, where the fuck is Mix 1? We weren’t even trusted with hearing the evolution of our own sound.”

“We were silenced. Undermined. Ignored into thinking our instincts were wrong. Every no chipped away at who we were. We weren’t even allowed to put our biggest track, Money, on the album. We’d said from day one we wanted Leave It Out and Let’s Dance on there. But slowly, surely, everything we cared about got stripped away. We lost ourselves.”

Power clarified that there were “genuinely good people at the label” who “really did care and tried their best for us”, but said they were the “minority” who were “just as powerless as we were”.

He also reiterated that the band are “massively proud” of ‘Fear Life For A Lifetime’, but said “we can be proud but sad by how things were at the same time”.

“To every young artist: don’t let anyone change your core,” he concluded. “Don’t let them chip away at your identity in exchange for some promise that never arrives. Don’t become another line item on someone’s spreadsheet. If they don’t see your worth unless someone else is in the room, they don’t deserve to be in yours.”

“And to the system that tried to turn us into something we’re not – fuck you.”

NME have contacted Polydor Records for a response to Power’s statement.

NME awarded ‘Fear Life For A Lifetime’ four stars, writing: “Front-loaded with its three singles, the change of course in ‘Fear Life For A Lifetime’ ensures it closes on a colossus of emotion. Sure to be lapped up by their ever-growing, cult-like young fanbase, this stellar debut album will only add to the case that this is a band with heaps of ambition, primed to level up while staying true to their indie-punk roots.”

RAYE, meanwhile, has spoken more about her own split from Polydor in recent years. Speaking to NME in 2022, she said: “When you sign with a record label, technically they work for you: you’re signing to a company for them to work for your career and take you to that next level. But as a woman, it just doesn’t feel like that. It feels like you’re working for them. And you know, some of the things I had to put my body through to even be able to that… it’s really quite sad.”

She later told Louis Theroux in 2023: “It wasn’t at all planned, it was more of a desperate cry to be free. It’s so deep, what I’d realised I’d actually been doing to myself as a person, to try and be the somebody that they wanted me to be. It’s so sad.

“At the end of the day it’s a business and I wasn’t selling what [the record label] wanted me to sell.”

The post STONE talk exit from Polydor Records: “FUCK the corps who try and control bands and change their sound” appeared first on NME.