shame Announce New Album Cutthroat

One of South London’s best post-punk exports, shame is back with the news of its fourth studio LP, Cutthroat, their follow-up to 2023’s Food For Worms Alongside the announcement comes the title track: a brash, guitar-forward, psych punk jam, with an absurdist, nightmare-fueled music video to match.

Out September 5 via Dead Oceans, Cutthroat finds shame (made up of childhood friends Charlie Steen, Sean Boyle-Smith, Eddie Green, Josh Finerty, and Charlie Forbes) facing cowardice and corruption head-on while still keeping their wry wit and humor close. The band collaborated with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen) on the album, aiming for a confrontational, unapologetic record that ventures further into the possibilities of electronic noise and texture. Regardless of the means, shame is dedicated to keeping its message close—to ground the chaos in something human, and contextualize the insanity of the world we live in. The band confronts everything bad and broken about the world, but do so with clarity, irony, and a sense of sharp-eyed defiance, as if daring listeners to see through the madness with them. “We live in crazy times,” vocalist Charlie Sheen said in a press release. “But it’s not about ‘Poor me.’ It’s about ‘Fuck you.’”

Lead single “Cutthroat” is an in your face introduction to the what’s to come. It’s steeped in attitude, with blown out yell-sing vocals from Steen remnant of the Dare both in delivery and content (“Motherfucker, I was born to die”). That idea sits at the center of the song’s thesis: If nothing matters, why not do what you want? But shame sneaks a moment of uncertainty in the lyrics with the fleeting, blink-and-you-miss-it “I’m afraid to stay the same.” The corresponding video depicts shame performing at the bottom of a “Wall of Death” circus stage as Steen circles his bandmates on a bicycle. It’s equally as fever dreamy as the song: animated and crazy-eyed and just preposterous enough to be charming.