Cutthroat

About

As one of a few shouty, abrasive, angular bands coalescing around Brixton live venue and rehearsal space The Windmill during the late 2010s, shame found themselves being ushered into a pigeonhole. Alongside the likes of Squid, black midi, and Black Country, New Road, they were heralded as the new wave of post-punk by a UK music press and A&R industry keen to have uncovered the next fertile scene. Wisely, the five-piece did their best to elude those strictures on the follow-ups to 2018 debut <i>Songs of Praise</i>. But reflecting on 2021’s <i>Drunk Tank Pink</i> and <i>Food for Worms</i> (2023), records that benefitted from ideas drawn from psych-rock, folk, jazz, and even singing lessons, shame began to wonder if some of their urgency had been thinned out. As a result, <i>Cutthroat</i> arrives with the band’s horizons still broad but their sound revitalized. The title track, with its combustion of riffs and groove, and the agitated polemic of “Cowards Around” captures the bracing, confrontational energy of the band’s live shows. It’s an opening salvo that establishes the vim and efficiency with which they go on to try out rockabilly (“Quiet Life”), the cockeyed but melodic sound of early Pavement (“Plaster”), sing-along indie pop (“Spartak”), and a collision of Portuguese folk, disco, and New Wave (“Lampião”). Against this absorbing backdrop, singer Charlie Steen muses on just how conflicted and paradoxical the human condition is. And he does it with a little more self-assurance and a bit less vulnerability and doubt than before. “Well, you can follow your fashions/You can follow your cliques/And I feel sorry for you/For feeling sorry for me,” he declares on “Spartak.” <i>Cutthroat</i> is shame continuing to explore their sound—and arriving somewhere increasingly unique.

via Apple Music