Progressive RockAlternative
Spencer Park Music · 11 September 2026
“Loungeside” opens on four minutes twelve of distortion and clipped riffs that gradually widen into something more expressive, and well before the end there are keyboards holding the melody and a voice carrying the song. Tom Hunt is the first keyboard player to join the band as a full member, and you can hear it in where Matt Stevens’ and Steve Cleaton’s guitars now sit: they accompany a vocal line instead of building it themselves.
The band started out instrumental and first added vocals on “News from the Invisible World” (2023); this is their fifth album and the first that lets itself write choruses, with Kevin Feazey singing from behind the bass. “The 1234” (3:15) is the hardest of the three advance singles, “Shake Hands & Exit” (4:55) the most open, with ambient stretches in the middle, and “Somehow” (3:40) lands between them with a chorus that sticks on first contact.
The second half is where the songs pull furthest away from the format. “Superbia” (5:02) ends on a melody built out of handclaps; “Dream Sequence” (3:51) stays in shadow and echo almost the whole way and only breaks open at the close; “Thrash” (3:44), whatever the title promises, is one of the most restrained things here; and “Hypernormalisation” (4:12) alternates weight and atmosphere inside a single track. “Signal Bleed” (4:39) closes on choir vocals and almost no distortion, which is as far from the opening as the album gets.
Not one of the ten tracks reaches five and a half minutes. The band spent more than a decade building by accumulation and here they have swapped long development for immediacy; “Dream Sequence” is the only place where the other approach can still be heard, and it gets three minutes fifty-one — enough to suggest it, not enough to lay it out.
Spencer Park Music, 11 September 2026. Ten tracks, 39:52. Sleeve by Mark Buckingham of Marvel and DC, as on the last one.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Guillem Cardós