AlternativeMetal

Human Worth · 18 September 2026

After «#makemoneymakelovemakemoney», which serves as a nearly six-minute doorway in, «Retrain as a Swan» arrives and shows what the record is about: a saturated guitar riff, Ed Dudley’s screams four bars later, no recognisable verse or chorus anywhere. The track moves between riff blocks, vocals pushed to the edge and spoken passages, and pulls back just when it seems like it should push forward.

It’s the London band’s fourth full-length. The centre of gravity is «HUMAN RIGHT$», seven and a half minutes bringing in acoustic guitar, cello and reversed-guitar samples, with Hannah Asprey (IAN) and Ross Sargeant (Pascagoula) as guests. It’s also the track least like the textbook noise rock that currently dominates that scene, and the one that shows the band can do more than turn the volume up.

«Accidental Holiday» drops the tempo into the mud and stretches out for nine and a quarter minutes of almost gentle riffs, ahead of one last hit in the middle stretch. What follows it, «Birds of a Feather is on in 7 minutes», closes the record in two and a half minutes of clean melody.

That closer is the reservation. After forty minutes built on tension, and a nine-minute piece that already worked as decompression, the final track arrives too short to be an ending and too soft to be a blow. «Retrain as a Swan» was the first advance single, with a video, and «Disrespect the Arts» the second; Human Worth puts it out digitally and on physical formats.

Rating: 7.8/10

Text by Marçal Bonastre