The Tubs – Hard Life
★★★★★
MERGE
Iridescent jangle nirvana. Visceral punk energy. Mournful folk-accented vocalese. Stinging oaths of love and hate, with occasional chipmunk harmonies. The third Tubs album contains this and more, to the delight of all who enjoyed the first two Tubs albums for the abundance of said qualities.
One of its 12 songs, however, breaks new ground. Opening with a groovily offbeat drum pattern, Do Yourself A Favor bops onto the dancefloor amid frantic guitar downstrokes and an incessant keyboard riff deserving of its own hand-jive routine. This is actually a Prince song, albeit one with complex provenance and never released in his lifetime. The Tubs infuse it with their Celtic-tinged shimmer, while the lyric could almost be one of Tubs songwriter Owen Williams’ own admonitory put-downs, another splinter of tough love wisdom torn from his journal: he was down, but now he’s “freer than the butterfly”, so “walk on by, baby”. Prince’s nine-minute version extended to improv trash talk; sadly, The Tubs exeunt at 4:09, having added mesmeric nu-wave disco to their repertoire. How perfect that after being compared to Hüsker Dü so often, The Tubs should cover the other molten pop force from ’80s Minneapolis.
Such logic is all over Hard Life, an album that consolidates and amplifies both 2023’s debut Dead Meat and last year’s Cotton Crown, transcending notions of what indie rock is supposed to be in the 21st century. The opening title track’s siren guitar intro is a suitably auspicious entrance, its Whovian powerchordage teeing up a killer first couplet: “Yeah you spend your money on aftershave/But when you go out you still smell the same.” Meet Dr Williams from the toilet circuit school of psychiatry, who feels your pain then throws it back like a bad pint: “The day never comes when you finally know exactly what you’re gonna be/Apart from a fat bloke in a sad pub telling me, ‘It’s a hard life’…”
The extent to which Owen Williams is talking to himself in these wounding, funny, minutely crafted songs is moot. Beyond doubt, however, is The Tubs’ place in the pantheon of great self-referential rock bands. If You Don’t Love Me sees Williams’ heartsore petulance driving career sabotage: “I don’t wanna sell out this tour, don’t wanna play in The Tubs anymore.” Way It Goes ponders a rarely acknowledged dilemma: “If we go back to America then it’s over/’Cos I can’t stand another fucking Yank telling me they’re sober.” On Who’s Gonna Love You Now?, meanwhile, Williams counsels a friend/bandmate/bloke-in-the-mirror against escaping to London to “join The TSG”, AKA The Tubs’ Gob Nation-label affiliates led by drummer Taylor Stewart. This bustling Smiths-go-kinda-Northern soul romp asserts that the departure of original guitarist George Nicholls hasn’t damaged the creative chemistry, with replacement Dan Lucas equally comfortable with those signature up-tempo Johnny Marr filigrees.
The capital city as malign spirit was a theme of 2025’s Cotton Crown, and it recurs here in Heaven Or London, where Williams portrays “the singer of a ripoff band… wanking himself into an early grave”. His self-abasement plumbs Stygian depths amid Stoogean guitar flare-outs, as Williams Auto-Tunes his voice to helium levels in lieu of his usual harmonist (and erstwhile Joanna Gruesome/Ex-Vöid bandmate) Lan McCardle.
Beyond the high calibre musicianship and arrangements, it’s obvious why The Tubs have stirred a certain constituency who had come to doubt that such a traditionally oriented group could still impact in an age where cultural expression has become self-moderated to the point of banality. Rather than baulking at Stoop To Me resembling not just one but two Bob Mould songs, The Tubs merrily punch through the chord sequence’s adjacency to Mould’s 2014 zinger I Don’t Know You Anymore and then directly quote Sugar in the chorus’s line “If I can’t change your mind”, wrapping the whole in Chris Haigh’s fiddle for the full Fairport effect. Such is their full immersion in the accrued vocabulary of an art form that was never meant to get so old, they somehow make these moves feel fresh.
Faultlessly sequenced, Hard Life’s first half ends with Didn’t I Say, an acoustic charm bracelet on the inevitability of disappointment. Fluted keys burnish this fingerpicked millennial equivalent of Richard & Linda Thompson’s The End Of The Rainbow: “Didn’t I say when the chips are down that no one ever really comes around.” Then Do Yourself A Favor kicks off a thrilling side two, leaning into the deep-dug euphoria of Now And Then, its bleak romantic pragmatism echoing Cotton Crown’s Manic Street Preachers-referencing One More Day (“When you spurn my little Welsh heart”). This time the harmonies are McCardle’s; likewise on Hell, a spring-heeled determination to “let the heart hate what it hates”. The album’s shortest song at 1:43, it’s followed by the longest, In Your Place, a five-minute tower of geometric arpeggios, essentially just a single verse and chorus that repeat then bow to multiple reiterations of the opening melodic figure, its regretful descent like a river searching for a source, echoing perhaps Williams’ bleakest self-laceration: “Loving you’s like looking into a crystal ball and seeing nothing/Nothing there at all,” he and McCardle coo. Following a mid-point break down, the song epically rebuilds, driven by Stewart and bassist Max Warren with incremental guitar licks and fiddle player Haigh’s melancholy skirl.
This masterpiece of tension and release would have made a worthy album closer, yet there’s still one final dagger-twist: As Long As You Leave, a ghostly near-solo Williams rumination upon an impossible love triangle, its beautiful Bert Jansch stylings courtesy of George Nicholls – proof that you can leave The Tubs to become a full-time academic, but The Tubs won’t leave you.
Hard Life is consistent with what we already knew. It benefits from a superior sonic cohesion, thanks to being wholly recorded with Sam Ayres and Rachel Kenedy at their London studio, but the guitarist swap aside, fundamentally nothing else has changed here. The Tubs are an exceptional band, casually delivering brutal truths in the most glorious way. Those not already initiated could do themselves a favour.
Hard Life is out September 11 on Merge.
Tracklisting:
1. Hard Life
2. Who’s Gonna Love You Now?
3. If You Don’t Love Me
4. Stoop to Me
5. Heaven Or London
6. Didn’t I Say?
7. Do Yourself A Favor
8. Now And Then
9. The Way It Goes
10. Hell
11. In Your Place
12. As Long As You Leave
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