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The Bug Club live in Brighton at Concorde 2 on 2nd June! Get tickets above, or from Dice. This is a co-pro with Acid Box.The Bug Club are back with a new album. It’s been a whole seven months since their last. Where have they been?
Every Single Muscle, the band’s 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 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.
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 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. https://thebugclub.bandcamp.com/
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Accessibility: Fully accessible to wheelchairs, all on one level. Gendered toilets. If you require a carer at the venue, please contact us at [email protected] for guestlist, with evidence such as a blue badge or access card. If strobe lighting is an issue or if standing for long periods of time is an issue, please contact us in advance. More information: https://www.concorde2.co.uk/faq
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Concorde 2, Brighton, United Kingdom
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