shame present ‘Spartak,’ the third single/video from their new album Cutthroat, out 5th September via Dead Oceans. Following last month’s “bombastic”, (The Needle Drop) “rockabilly banger”(Stereogum) ‘Quiet Life’ (currently on the BBC 6 Music Playlist), Spartak” rolls in on an Americana-flecked country lilt. “I was basically trying to write a Wilco song,” Coyle-Smith comments. Lyrically, the song criticises cliques and group-mentality, setting its crosshairs on the social climbers; the people at the party always looking over your shoulder trying to find someone more important.
“I guess this disdain towards cliques comes from how shit I was made to feel by the cool kids growing up,” Steen explains. “ I was a chubby teenager who liked the wrong type of music and wore the wrong type of clothes. It’s just another time I’d like to say fuck you to those people, and to anyone who makes someone feel shitty for not fitting in.” The song’s accompanying video was directed by Steen.
Cutthroat is shame at their blistering best; an unapologetic new album made with Grammy winning producer John Congleton at the helm. “It’s about the cowards, the cunts, the hypocrites,” says Steen. “Let’s face it, there’s a lot of them around right now.”
Still in their twenties and having proved themselves several times over since their 2018 debut, Songs of Praise, the five childhood friends – singer Charlie Steen, guitarists Sean Coyle-Smith and Eddie Green, bassist Josh Finerty and drummer Charlie Forbes – went into Cutthroat ready to create a new Ground Zero. Stamped throughout with shame’s trademark sense of humour, the album takes on the big issues of today and gleefully toys with them. Holed up in Salvation Studios in Brighton, they cast a merciless eye on themes of conflict and corruption; hunger and desire; lust, envy and the omnipresent shadow of cowardice.
Musically, too, the record plays with visceral new ideas. Making electronic music on tour for fun, Coyle-Smith had previously seen the loops he was crafting as a separate entity to the things he wrote for shame. Then, he realised, maybe they didn’t have to be. “This time, anything could go if it sounded good and you got it right,” he says. This cheeky self-awareness, too, is important. The result is an album that revels in the idiosyncrasies of life, raising an eyebrow and asking the ugly questions that so often get tactfully brushed over. But the one answer that Cutthroat gives with a resounding flourish is that, right now, shame have never sounded better.
Shame
Cutthroat
Track Listing:
- Cutthroat
- Cowards Around
- Quiet Life
- Nothing Better
- Plaster
- Spartak
- To and Fro
- Lampião
- After Party
- Screwdriver
- Packshot
- Axis of Evil
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