(Merge)
Britain’s best indie-rockers hold fast to their defiantly old-school sound, slipping wry sideways looks at despair in among hooky melodies that always sound like a good time
On a track called Heaven or London from the Tubs’ third album, the quartet’s frontman, Owen Williams, offers a blunt self-assessment. He is, he suggests, “the singer of a rip-off band”, engaged in “wanking himself into an early grave”. It’s a strange thing to say given that the Tubs have recently become a critical cause célèbre. Their last album, Cotton Crown, was a regular fixture in best of 2025 lists. They have been unexpectedly clasped to the bosom of the heritage rock press and had a profile in the New Yorker, which called them a “British jangle-rock band, with a cheeky dirtbag edge”.
That they’ve achieved this not by pandering to the dictates of musical fashion but by ploughing their own furrow makes it even more impressive. Much has been made of Williams’s vocal resemblance to folk-rock legend Richard Thompson, and you can understand why. But what the Tubs really sound like is old-school, pre-Madchester indie rock. Distorted guitars do battle with trebly acoustic or 12-string guitar, the punky heft and wistful melodies evocative of Hüsker Dü or the Replacements in their poppier, post-hardcore years. You could also throw pre-stadium REM into the mix: the most plangent of the lead guitar lines on Hard Life have a ring of Peter Buck about them, such as the lovely figures that spin around If You Don’t Love Me, and the arpeggio that drives In Your Place along for five and half minutes. The album comes liberally decorated with violin, which recalls Amanda Brown’s contributions to the Go-Betweens’ late-80s albums.
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