The Bug Club - Every Single Muscle

Ltd Loser Edition Blue Vinyl

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).

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.

Genre: Garage Rock / Alt Rock