All hail bands that just can’t seem to stop making cool stuff. There are a bunch of points along the creative arc that a band can experience, of course. There’s late-career coasting and the late-career comeback. If they’re lucky, there’s an imperial phase, where they can do no wrong. Inevitably, it’s followed by the long, slow decline—or, perhaps, a sudden nosedive. And sometimes, the early years are particularly fertile. Take, for example, The Bug Club, a hyper-prolific duo from Wales who released: their debut EP in early 2021; their debut full-length the following fall; several EPs and singles, including a live album under a pseudonym scattered among those aforementioned releases; another full-length in 2023, this time with 47 songs; and a very good third full-length, On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System, just last August, wherein the band cranked up the riffs without sacrificing any of their irresistibility.
Now, it’s time for The Bug Club’s fourth studio album in less than three years, and the band’s second effort for Sub Pop Records. It’s called Very Human Features, and it finds Tilly Harris (bass, vocals) and Sam Willmett (guitar, vocals) mellowing out just a bit—sonically, at least. The band still pulls from a range of energetic influences—rubbery post-punk, serrated indie-pop, DIY garage-rock—but they also take the opportunity to stretch themselves into new, more nuanced directions, basically swinging the pendulum back from last year’s heavier On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System.
Don’t misunderstand: Very Human Features still has more than its share of perfectly toe-tapping bangers built from bouncy bass lines, crunchy guitars, and relentless propulsion. “Twirling in the Middle” follows that recipe and mixes in 12 seconds of rocksteady beat, Bug Club-style. The band struts convincingly on “Young Reader” and fuses surf-rock with new wave in “Beep Boop Computers.” Later, “How To Be A Confidante” sounds like Courtney Barnett fronting the Modern Lovers, while “Living in the Future” tumbles and zigzags as Willmett succinctly sums up some of the bleaker aspects of our tired-and-wired modern life:
We’ll blame the shame we’re feeling
On every other human
We’ll take the brightest dream and flood the television
With this, and that, we can’t comprehend the meaning of it all
After four albums and a raft of odds and ends, one thing is for sure: The Bug Club knows how to write and perform and record a good, punky pop-rock song. What Very Human Features shows us is that Harris and Willmett can do other things well, too, but more importantly, that they want to do other things: “Jealous Boy” provides a quick peek into the band’s soft, jangling side; “The Sound of Communism” imagines a sort of twee Cate Le Bon. “Muck (Very Human Features)” is quiet and folky and a little unsettling; “Appropriate Emotions” closes the album with a combination of hope, humor and easygoing melodic charm that almost feels like the work of an entirely different band.
But it’s not a different band. It’s The Bug Club—a band with an uncommon abundance of good ideas and the drive and know-how to bring them to life. Very Human Features is strong evidence they’re not in danger of running out anytime soon.
Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in Oregon and has been writing about music for more than two decades. Follow him on Twitter at @bcsalmon.
