Every Single Muscle

Description

The Bug Club are back with a new album. Its been a whole eleven months since their last. Where have they been?

Every Single Muscle, the bands fifth LP, arrives May 29th, 2026 via Sub Pop, making it a hat-trick for the Welsh duo and their esteemed Seattle-based patrons. 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.

So that answers that first question. Not that youd have otherwise known. Ever self-effacing, songwriters Sam (guitar, vocals) and Tilly (bass, vocals) go as far as to claim that theyve been sitting around doing nothing at all during track Its Our Manager David. Thats 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. Dead serious. Its the first of many sub-two-minute tracks on the album, setting the tone for The Bug Clubs 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. Hes given two seconds.

Not that were short-changed, though, because Sam asks again later on and is granted more. Across eighteen tunes theres enough classic Sam/Tilly guitar interplay to satisfy even the most vociferous Bug Club club member and firmly refute the bands own claim that they are only just about technically proficient on our instruments. Full Range of Motion has a choppy rhythm that sits atop drummer Toms tight beat and serves to remind us all of Minutemen, for a minute. Make It Count brings sweet melody and call and response, while All My Clothes Fell Off allows for a slower paced ballad that builds to a crescendo that would not be out of place in the world of classic rock. Cut to Black combines a Sparks-esque falsetto and Tillys melodic bass playing with a rhythm something close-ish to what Klaus Dinger used to do for Neu! And closer My Uncle Warren Drives a Passat sees them doing a bit of a left turn and swapping out guitars for keys. This records 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 theyll get it in there somehow.

On to the words, because with these guys those are important. 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 too. Self-interested in an entirely new sense of the term, the human form and condition is prodded and inspected from every angle throughout the course of the album. Look Like Me sees them singing about their own appearance, while on How Can We Be Friends they are preoccupied with others. Every Single Muscle itemises organs as if they belong on a shopping list, and both Make It Count and Pretty as a Magazine bemoan the fact people dont know what to do with their own bodies. Altogether, 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 hes bored of being human. The Bug Club seem almost suspicious of the concept of being a person – as if theyve woken up in a costume they didnt want to put on and cannot take off.

Initially comprising the songwriting core of Sam Willmett (vocals/guitar) and Tilly Harris (vocals/bass) with Dan Matthew (drums), The Bug Club started plying their trade in 2016. They were signed by UK label Bingo Records in Autumn 2020 and first single We Dont Need Room for Lovin was released in February 2021, followed by EP Launching Moondream One. It quickly established The Bug Club as the tongue-in-cheek and live-focused antidote to the previous years penned-in pandemic drudgery. BBC 6 Musics Marc Riley was an early champion.

Pure Particles followed, whose vinyl release included a board game brimming with cult references. Fed up with the conventional approach they then released Intelectuals: a standalone track that was actually a five-track song suite like some kind of streaming-model-snubbing, Telecaster-bashing answer to Bach. Highbrow musos took a lyrical beating for the ages. Second standalone release Two Beauties marked release number two for 2022 and built up to the appearance of debut album Green Dream in F# by October. The following January they decided to pull their fingers out, get some disguises and support themselves on tour as Mr Anyways Holey Spirits. A live album documented this, then they got abstract with titles and put out the picture disc Picture This! By the autumn of 2023 it was time for forty-seven track, poetry-infused double album Rare Birds: Hour of Song.

During a trip to America they caught the eye of Sub Pop, just in time to get them on board to serve up a beefy slab of garage-punk on On the Inner Workings of the System, gaining an appropriately beefed-up stateside following in the process. The partnership proved fruitful, and with Sup Pop firmly in The Bug Club club they got cracking on Very Human Features. Is three the magic number? Probably not. But Every Single Muscle – number three for The Bug Club and Sub Pop – certainly comes close enough to convince your average strange human person that it might be.