The Bug Club Is Back With Their First New Album in …Eleven Months!
Caldicot, Monmouthshire, Wales’ finest, The Bug Club, will release Every Single Muscle, their incredible new album on CD/LP/all DSPs worldwide on Friday, May 29th, from Sub Pop. The 18-track longplayer features today’s first single, “Watching the Omnibus,” along with approximately 17 other tight, anxious, and engaging garage-punk numbers like “Yours (If You Want Me),” “A Good Day for Dying,” “Make It Count,” and “My Uncle Warren Drives a Passat.” Every Single Muscle was produced and mixed by Tom Rees at Rat Trap Studios in Cardiff, Wales, and mastered by Mikey Young.
Every Single Muscle is available to preorder now on CD/LP/all DSPs from Sub Pop. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com in North America, Mega Mart Europe in the UK + EU, and your local record store, will receive the limited Loser Edition opaque blue (NA) and blue vinyl (UK/EU)(all vinyl color editions whilst stock lasts!). Every Single Muscle also features what is likely the band’s most BONKERS cover art to date, illustrated by Ross Willmett.
The Bug Club has also announced headlining UK dates for May and June 2026, plus a May 23rd support slot opening for Super Furry Animals in London. Additional live dates will be announced soon.
Sat. May 23 - London, UK - Brixton Academy*
Mon. Jun. 01- Norwich, UK - Arts Centre
Tue. Jun. 02 - Brighton, Uk - Concorde 2
Wed. Jun. 03 - Bristol, UK - The Lantern
Thu. Jun. 04 - Liverpool, UK - Hangar 34
Fri. Jun. 05 - Leeds, UK - Project House
Sat. Jun. 06 - Barry, UK - Memo Arts Centre
* supporting Super Furry Animals
The Bug Club are back with a new album. It’s been a whole eleven months since their last. Where have they been?
Every Single Muscle, the band’s fifth LP, arrives 29th May 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 you’d have otherwise known. 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 track “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. Dead serious. 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.
Not that we’re short-changed, though, because 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.” “Full Range of Motion” has a choppy rhythm that sits atop drummer Tom’s 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 Tilly’s 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 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, 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 don’t 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 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.
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 Don’t 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 year’s penned-in pandemic drudgery. BBC 6 Music’s 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 Anyway’s 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.
The Bug Club
Every Single Muscle
Tracklisting:
1. Miss Wales 2012
2. A Good Day for Dying
3. Make It Count
4. Cut to Black
5. Full Range of Motion
6. Pretty as a Magazine
7. Look Like Me
8. How Can We Be Friends
9. Every Single Muscle
10. Shiny and Wet
11. Semi-Automatic
12. In My Short Life
13. Watching the Omnibus
14. It’s Our Manager David
15. Yours (If You Want Me)
16. All My Clothes Fell Off
17. Third Best Friend
18. My Uncle Warren Drives a Passat
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