The Bug Club

The Bug Club are back, again, for their annual appointment at the garage rock makers’ market, where they’re flogging yet another pedigree record.

LP number four, Very Human Features, arrives June 13, hot on the heels of the band’s first Sub Pop release, 2024’s On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System. That record saw the band continue their love affair with BBC Radio 6, start up a new one with KEXP thanks to a session with them, and crop up in the pages of the NME. Anything else from the bucket list? Oh yeah, festival slots including packing home ground Green Man’s Walled Garden to its non-existent rafters. Then shows across the US in those venues us Brits tend to hear about and that’s as far as we get. This record gives the band an excuse to continue their never-ending tour and feed their baying fans, engorged and expectant thanks to this band’s relentless record-releasing hot streak, a new batch of typically playful, riff-laden, smart Bug Club Tunes.

But first, a standalone single, because that’s how things are done here. “Have you ever been to Wales?”, asks the band in “Have U Ever Been 2 Wales.” If not, why not? It’s good. A new, discordant national anthem, if they didn’t already have a decent harmonious one. Oh, to be from a country where national pride is something other than the mark of a tosser. Starting as a classic, chugging chantalong, it’s interrupted by what sounds like an alien choir before they let rip. Think Dinosaur Jr. with a job at the tourist board. And Welsh. Definitely Welsh.

Personally, I hate it when an unnecessary personal opinion is inserted where it’s not needed - band bios, for example - in order to offload an uninteresting individual hot take. Maybe that’s why this stuff works: thankfully, on Very Human Features The Bug Club have continued in their habit of presenting as a collective mind. Two-in-one. Rarely do you find a band with two creative forces that have such a singular, shared perspective, sense of humour and knack for a pop melody. In “Beep Boop Computers” vocalists Sam (also on guitar) and Tilly (on bass) swap between “I”s, “my”s and “we”s as if there isn’t any difference between the lot, all the while skewering interpersonal relationships and experiences in a glorious, glam rock dismantling of the human aspects the album’s title references. Staying on topic, “How to Be a Confidante” does that-thing-The-Bug-Club-really-know-how-to-do where they, again speaking as two voices from the same mind, pluck out common aspects of how we all live and make them sound ridiculous. The surreal is in the familiar, not in ignoring the familiar - The Bug Club know this and that understanding joins an unrelenting bassline in forming the backbone of this garage-infused belter.

It’s no surprise that, in poking fun at the familiar, the humour is by track two turned inwards and it’s The Bug Club themselves in their own firing line. In “Twirling in the Middle,” after taking a detour to insult both airport-littering spy-fiction writer Andy McNab and the collective authors of the Bible, Sam and Tilly sing, “did you think this was over, cos we’re just getting started.” A reference to their prolific output perhaps - this is the fourth LP since 2022, not to mention all the EPs and standalone odds and ends, after all. Then they twist the knife further, hari-kari style, when they raise eyebrows at their own tempo change (“are we doing the rocksteady?”) and then add “just when you’re ready for this to be over, we’ll start playing solos” before doing exactly that. And it’s a proper solo too - they always are. It’s a rollercoaster unpicking of whatever-it-is The Bug Club do, while at the same time building on the work done in previous albums and presenting us with layers of creativity piled up atop one another.

Sam and Tilly, combined. There’s a name for that - and it’s tempting to think that they might be, given all the joking around. But the multi-dimensional nature to The Bug Club is what makes Very Human Features just as relistenable as their previous work. “Jealous Boy,” “Appropriate Emotions” and “Muck (Very Human Features)” all lend the LP a more poignant tone. The first tackles expectations and comparisons, with a loud-quiet-loud structure reflecting the ups-and-downs and outbursts unavoidable in frustration and anger. “Appropriate Emotions” manages to be deeply relatable while making its singers sound about as removed from the human experience as possible - perhaps that’s why it’s relatable. And “Muck (Very Human Features)” combines some of the folkier and spoken-word elements of album two, Rare Birds: Hour of Song, to ruminate on one’s place in the world.

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 the 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 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 Intricate 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. An assured and endlessly witty whirlwind of literary, self-referential, good-humoured rock ‘n’ roll, the new record sees the band riding their ever-swelling wave of popularity as if it’s a quick whizz around the Caldicot Aldi carpark on a pair of rollerskates. Long may it continue.