Pre-Order: Every Single Muscle [CD]

The Bug Club are back with a new album. It's been a whole seven months since their last. Where have they been?Every Single Muscle, the band's fifth LP overall, is the third to be released by the Welsh duo's esteemed Seattle-based patrons Sub Pop. Since Very Human Features, which emerged in June of 2025, the non-stop tour has seen the BBC 6 Music and KEXP favourites ping-pong across the Atlantic like they used to the Severn Bridge. Various festival slots in the summer kept them from having any sort of holiday - who needs one when you live in Wales anyway? - until it was time to head back to the writing room. Which is most likely still a bedroom in Caldicott frequented by a greyhound called Ted (listen out - he shows up in one of the songs). Ever self-effacing, songwriters Sam (guitar, vocals) and Tilly (bass, vocals) go as far as to claim that they've been sitting around "doing nothing at all" during the song "It's Our Manager David." That's clearly a lie. Every Single Muscle gets off to a full-throttle, chugging start with "Miss Wales 2012," referencing a competition both Tilly and Sam have actually won. It's the first of many sub-two-minute tracks on the album, setting the tone for The Bug Club's punkiest offering yet and recalling both the short, sharp snaps of their very first singles and the grunt of recent releases. So packed is the album with wall-to-wall riffs and lyrical hooks rammed into tight confines that Sam actually asks permission to squeeze in a solo during second track "A Good Day For Dying." He's given two seconds. Happily, Sam asks again later on and is granted more. Across eighteen tunes there's enough classic Sam/Tilly guitar interplay to satisfy even the most vociferous Bug Club club member and firmly refute the band's own claim that they are only "just about technically proficient on our instruments." This record's an exercise in efficient maximalism - the musical equivalent of your dad packing the car for a holiday. Bring what you like; space is tight but they'll get it in there somehow. On to the words: While Very Human Features did an excellent job of pointing at everyday things and highlighting their absurdity, on Every Single Muscle The Bug Club look more closely at themselves. Not so much in an introspective way, though. More in a way an alien might probe a captive specimen on an intergalactic gurney. Horror movies get their "body" subgenre, now garage rock albums get theirs. Self-interested in an entirely new sense of the term, the human form and condition is prodded and inspected from every angle over the course of the album. We get a sense of surreal detachment from the self that sets up the ever-present ennui-laden humour; the last song sees Sam announce he's "bored of being human." The Bug Club seem almost suspicious of the concept of being a person - as if they've woken up in a costume they didn't want to put on and cannot take off.Is three the magic number? Probably not. But Every Single Muscle - Sub Pop album number three for The Bug Club - certainly comes close enough to convince your average strange human person that it might be.