(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

O n 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.

None of these are particularly hip names to drop in 2026, an era in which what gets called “indie” largely cleaves to post-punk revivalism, misty shoegazing or the sound of the first Arctic Monkeys album – or the glossy 80s pop-rock that indie was once supposed to be an alternative to. O that might be part of the Tubs’ appeal: this is audibly not a band that’s been focus-grouped into existence or subject to the ministrations of an A&R department with a keen interest in Spotify playlists.

The Tubs’ mounting success is a cheering thing, but it doesn’t seem to have cheered Williams much. Three tracks into Hard Life, he’s threatening to quit the band entirely.

“I don’t wanna sell out this tour, don’t wanna play with the Tubs any more,” he complains when a relationship hits the rocks in If You Don’t Love Me. On The Way It Goes, meanwhile, he casts a gloomy eye Stateside, New Yorker correspondents and all.

“If we go back to America, then it’s over,” he opines as guitars rage and sparkle around his pained voice, “because I can’t stand another fucking Yank telling me they’re sober”.

But as anyone familiar with the Tubs’ oeuvre to date would doubtless point out, this is very much par for the course with Williams’s writing. His songs exist in a peculiar space.

On the one hand, they seem diaristic, alarmingly frank about a lot of heavy stuff, including his precarious mental health and his mother’s suicide . On the other, he freely admits to amping up their tone of self-loathing and painting himself as “more unlikable than I actually am” for blackly comic value, like a kind of alt-rock Larry David.

On Hard Life, he takes this approach a stage further. Some of the songs seem to be entirely heartfelt; others are written from the viewpoint of a character whose primary concern seems to be underlining what an arsehole Owen Williams is: “The day never comes when you finally know exactly what you’re going to be,” he snaps on the title track, “apart from a fat bloke in a sad pub telling me ‘It’s a hard life’.”

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It’s a curious, meta slant, but the results are grippingly entertaining and frequently hilarious, their impact intensified by the bright, hooky, major-key quality of the melodies and the blazing, live-in-the-studio energy of the Tubs’ playing: they sound like a good time, even when the lyrics are depicting the worst time imaginable. For a band with a resolutely traditional musical approach, they’re also not above throwing the listener a curveball.

Do Yourself a Favour excavates a lengthy 1982 Prince outtake from the Super Deluxe Edition of 1999 , chops its running time in half and re-decorates it with layer upon layer of chiming guitars to stunning effect. You can perhaps also detect the influence of Prince in their odd predilection for backing vocals sped up to a cartoonish squeak.

Perhaps some of the acclaim heaped on the Tubs is down to nostalgia – listeners of a certain age mistily recalling the music they heard on night-time Radio 1 in their teens. There’s doubtless some truth in that, but Hard Life, a moving, funny, immensely powerful album, suggests another, more prosaic reason: they’re very, very good at what they do.

Moses Boyd – Criticise (ft Amber-Simone)

Not an Alexander O’Neal cover but a potent slice of 21st-century soul, complete with immense guitar solo and an emotive vocal from Amber-Simone.

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