The title track sets the Motihari groove running from the off, a riff with the unhurried swagger of a man who knows the punchline before he's told the joke. "Chatbot Don't Like It" is the record's cheekiest provocation, turning the clatter and hum of machine logic into something almost danceable, before undercutting itself with a bleeped-out "Radio Clean Edit" tacked on as bonus track — a joke about censorship that censors itself, which feels less like a gimmick and more like the whole album's thesis performed in miniature.
Where the band earn their keep, though, is in the suite stitched together as "The Hubris March," pairing "Heedless Of The Storm" with "Ten Years Time" into a single uninterrupted slab of war-and-its-hangover songwriting. The "Guitar Bombs" passage that bridges the two — Winston's six-string de-tuned, cranked, and left to howl like distant artillery — does more to convey the sickening lurch from drumbeat patriotism to morning-after grief than a thousand op-eds could manage. Following it immediately with a cover of Creedence's "Fortunate Son" is the kind of bluntly funny gesture that shouldn't work on paper and works beautifully on record, like underlining a point you've already made just to watch the ink bleed through.
"Pleasure Craft" is the record's sliest move: a genuinely seductive piece of songcraft about the seduction of being kept docile by comfort, the prison disguised as a pocket-sized convenience. It doesn't lecture you about doom-scrolling so much as let you enjoy the doom-scroll for four minutes and then ask, quietly, how that felt. "Not What They Seem" carries a low-grade menace that suits its theme of slipping social reality, while "Save Ourselves" poses its question — where do we go once the whole of society has curdled into cult — without ever pretending to have a tidy answer.
By the time "Problematic (Reprise)" loops the central riff back around, its closing mutter of "I don't know but I've been told, I've been told but I don't know" lands like a self-aware shrug at the limits of certainty itself — fitting for a band this committed to doubt as a creative engine. "Someone's Dream" then closes things on a genuinely lovely note, all planetarium hush and satellite drift, a meditation on being remembered that earns its tenderness after forty-odd minutes of righteous noise.
Motihari Brigade have made a record that argues, convincingly, that asking inconvenient questions can still be a thrilling and tuneful pastime. Three albums in, Winston sounds like a songwriter who has finally worked out how to make defiance groove. *Problematic* doesn't just ask you to keep thinking — it makes thinking sound like fun again.