Progressive Rock
Self-released · 24 August 2026
“Shadow Puppets” opens with Lucy Shevchuk playing piano through a Leslie speaker, and its six minutes and eleven seconds already flag what’s coming: a track that starts out in cabaret colours and ends somewhere much darker and much heavier. Shevchuk sings, plays guitar and handles the keyboards; Jack Vallance takes the other guitar, Benedict Rhodes the bass, Tomos Cooper the drums, and Nathan Butcher splits his time between percussion and synths.
“Kill the King” runs four minutes fifteen and is where the quintet heads straight for eighties British hard rock: punk tempo, a riff that keeps running, and Vallance and Cooper pushing against each other to the finish. On “Pins and Mould”, six twenty-one, the band settles into AOR territory for the first half and turns it inside out in the second.
The record closes with “Masquerade”, six forty, on a guitar that circles like a fairground carousel and a choral arrangement that nudges the whole thing towards something close to ska.
Eleven tracks and nearly fifty-five minutes leave plenty of room, and Square Wild fill it with blues, vaudeville, punk, funk, AOR and cabaret without anything quite stitching it together: “The Drifter” (2:26), “Sailor” (3:07) and “Red and Blue” (3:27) are gone before they’ve settled, and the longest cut, “Malleus” (7:14), turns up once the record has already changed register four times.
It’s the band’s first full-length, eight years after forming and almost five after the EP “The Tree-P” (November 2021). They put it out themselves, with no label, on 24 August.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Guillem Cardós