Start with where it was made. Recording at The Heavy's studio within Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios, a place more commonly associated with sweeping, pristine, world-spanning music, is a bold act of mischief. It's like hiring a cathedral for a fight. Yet the room's famous warmth and depth serve the band beautifully, giving their racket space to breathe without once sanding down its teeth. Engineer Chris Ellul has the sense to get out of the way. The track was cut with the three of them playing together at the same moment, and you can hear it in every lurch and surge. Nothing here feels assembled. It feels *survived*.

The guitars are jagged, as promised, but the real thrill lies in how the whole thing is held together by tension rather than polish. The rhythm section drives forward with a restless, forearm-aching urgency, while the guitar scrapes and flares around it, never quite settling, never quite resolving. It's the sound of a song permanently on the verge of coming apart and refusing to do so. Post-punk's nervous angularity is in the bones, shoegaze's blurred, hazy shimmer drifts through the upper registers, and a noise-pop instinct for melody keeps surfacing like a hand through smoke. The band call it "controlled chaos", and for once the phrase is not a cliché but a precise technical description.

Lyrically, "Broken Drum" is about the thing most songs are about and few say honestly: that relationships, all of them, are difficult. Not just the romantic ones, though the band's self-described "noisy love songs about joy, despair and desperation" suggest they know that territory well, but the whole tangled web of people we are stuck with, devoted to and occasionally want to throw out of a window. Some matter more than others, they say, but none are easy. It's a wonderfully unglamorous thesis, delivered not with a sneer or a self-pitying wail but with the weary, wired directness of people who have lived it and found a way to turn it up loud.

That sense of shared burden is the track's secret weapon. With vocals split across all three members, the song carries a communal quality, a gang of friends hollering the same bruised truth in slightly different keys. It lends the whole performance an unforced, unfashionable generosity. Here are three people who plainly like and need each other, playing a song about how much people like and need each other, and the irony is lovely. The chemistry isn't a marketing claim. It is the entire engine of the thing.

Credit, too, to the finishing touches. Joe Mountain's mix keeps everything vivid and slightly dangerous, and Jon Walker's master, from a man whose CV runs from Overmono to Warmduscher and thus covers most of the human dance-floor spectrum, gives the track a punch that belies its modest origins. It sounds big without sounding fake, which in 2026 is a rarer trick than it should be.

Is it perfect? Perfection would be the wrong target, and the band would probably be appalled to hear it. What "Broken Drum" offers instead is something more valuable: urgency, character, and the unmistakable thrill of hearing a young group discover precisely what they sound like. It's a record that makes you want to see them in a small, sweaty room, and fortunately Bath's Widcombe Social Club, The Bell and St. James Wine Vaults are already on the calendar.

Remember the name. Turn the volume up. Let the neighbours complain.