THE WOLFGANG PRESS
OUT ON 25 SEP 2026 VIA DOWNWARDS RECORDS
LIVE DATES ANNOUNCED, INC 100 CLUB, LONDON - 30 JAN 2027
[The Wolfgang Press, credit Steve Gullick]
The Wolfgang Press have announced details of their ninth studio album, Asylum Variations, set for release via Downwards Records on 25 September 2026. The album, the follow up to 2024’s acclaimed album, A 2nd Shape – the band’s first in nearly thirty years – continues the return of one of post-punk’s most singular and restlessly inventive groups. Asylum Variations will be followed by a tour – full details to follow – that will include a performance at London’s 100 Club on 30 January 2027.
Listen to the album’s opener ‘Speakers Don’t Speak’, the first taste of what to expect from the album, HERE
With Asylum Variations The Wolfgang Press continue their tradition of never making the same album twice. Although the sonic DNA of A 2nd Shape is intact, the band ramp up the tension and dread while also creating a coherent and accessible set of songs. Recorded at Metway Studio in Brighton, UK, they utilised the method of recording directly onto ADAT and taking the results into the studio to use as the basis for the record. The resulting album is yet another step forward for a band who’s only constant is the fact that every album will sound different to the last.
Michael Allen explains, “The title is taken directly from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, where each piece is a portrait of a friend, family member and or acquaintance and supposedly has a hidden melody. With our album I felt that lyrically there was a thread that ran through the whole piece. The world has become increasingly unstable, both locally and globally, and each track is a visceral response to how I and others have been impacted by this change and how we are navigating through it.
Opener ‘Speakers Don’t Speak’ is driven by a Can-like beat, Roxy VCS3-style processed guitars, and gurgling analogue synths, over which singer/bassist Michael Allen’s seemingly stream-of-consciousness lyrics evoke unease without specifying its source. Elsewhere on the album, wheezing synths and haunted harmonies underpin ‘Blood On The Leaves’, with Allen’s bass melodically meandering before collapsing into a dubby breakdown, while ‘Sail By’ again references the dub influence that marked the band out from their early ‘80s post-punk peers.
With Allen in his best crooner mode, ‘Bind Us’ is ushered in on Andrew Gray’s undulating guitar, while his brother Stephen picks out the prettiest of keyboard melodies. Penultimate track ‘Embrace The Light’ is a sparse and downtempo ballad, which allows Allen to show off his yearning vocal to full effect and finale ‘Man Made Heaven’ crawls slowly to the album’s end, a nimble bassline darting around dirge-like guitars and a synthetic choir. Allen is joined by his daughters for a coda of “it’s a lie, it’s a lie”, finishing the album in a crescendo of industrial noise that manages to be both bleak yet strangely uplifting.
Maintaining such a dichotomy is not an easy thing to do, and it’s part of what made The Wolfgang Press so unique first time around. If Asylum Variations is anything to go by, the 21st century iteration of the band is more than capable of channelling this duality, their fractured music making them perfect for the fragmented times we find ourselves in.
Asylum Variations is released by Downwards Records on vinyl, CD and digitally on 25 Sep 2026
ASYLUM VARIATIONS TRACKLISTING
Blood On The Leaves
Lizard
Sail By
Bind Us
He Who Makes Rivers
The Art Of Writing
Embrace The Light
Man Made Heaven
THE WOLFGANG PRESS LIVE
10 Oct – Brighton (UK), Green Door Store
24 Oct - Łódź (PL), Soundedit Festival
30 Jan 2027 – London (UK), 100 Club - Real Sounds
EDITOR’S NOTES
The Wolfgang Press – Michael Allen (vocals, bass), Andrew Gray (guitar) and Stephen Gray (synthesisers, electronic textures) – are one of the most restlessly inventive groups to have emerged from the post-punk era. All three original members came up through the original 4AD roster: Allen and original keyboard player Mark Cox had been in both Rema-Rema and Mass, while Andrew Gray was a founding member of In Camera. Rema-Rema hold a particular distinction as the first band to release a record bearing the 4AD logo; their Wheel In The Roses EP remains a post-punk landmark, its members going on to shape Adam and the Ants, Psychic TV, and Renegade Soundwave.
The Wolfgang Press began when Allen and Cox took two bedroom-recorded tracks to 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell, who encouraged them to make an album. With Gray contributing guitar and drums to a handful of tracks, their debut The Burden of Mules (1983) may have been described by John Peel as “the most consciously morose record I’ve ever heard”, yet it gave way to a rapid creative evolution. A run of EPs produced by Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins hinted at multiple potential directions the band could go in, before Standing Up Straight (1986), produced by John Fryer, and Bird Wood Cage (1988), produced by Flood, refined and deepened their sound – the latter quietly influencing a generation of artists with its wah-wah guitar, gospel vocals and depth-charge dub. Queer (1991) expanded the lineup and introduced looser, clubbier grooves to their ominous funk, with standalone single ‘A Girl Like You’ reaching No.2 on the US Billboard Modern Rock chart – and catching the ear of Tom Jones, who recorded the track. The next album Funky Little Demons (1995) was more of a band affair, but Cox left before the supporting US tour, and after recording some demos as a duo, Allen and Gray called time on The Wolfgang Press.
A compilation from 4AD, Everything Is Beautiful (A Retrospective 1983–1995), was released in 2001, while Allen and Gray maintained their working relationship throughout the intervening years: Allen contributed vocals and keyboards to Gray’s Limehouse Outlaw project album Homegrown (2002), and Gray provided production for Allen’s Geniuser project debut Mud Black (2005).
The band’s reputation was sustained and extended during this period by the advocacy of artists including John Grant and Karl ‘Regis’ O'Connor, both of whom cited The Wolfgang Press as a significant influence. In 2020, the band’s name was reactivated for Unremembered Remembered, a Record Store Day release comprising of the demos recorded by Allen and Gray as a potential successor to Funky Little Demons.
A 2022 documentary about Rema-Rema, What You Could Not Visualise, and a subsequent – ultimately unrealised – collaborative project with that band’s former vocalist and Renegade Soundwave founder Gary Asquith, prompted renewed creative activity between Allen and Gray. This led to a new configuration of The Wolfgang Press, completed by the addition of Gray’s brother Stephen.
Recording to ADAT tape to recapture the analogue urgency of their early records, they released A 2nd Shape via Downwards Records in September 2024 to wide acclaim – the band’s first new music in nearly thirty years, and proof that their refusal to repeat themselves remains as vital as ever.
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