Shame Are All Gas, No Brakes

“Our live shows aren’t performance art—they’re direct, confrontational and raw. That’s always been the root of us,” reads the description for shame’s new record, Cutthroat. The band bristles at the idea of being performative, at anyone who looks at the quintet—vocalist Charlie Steen, guitarists Eddie Green and Sean Coyle-Smith, bassist Josh Finerty, and drummer Charlie Forbes—and accuses them of being contrived. “I don’t want to go on stage with a ukulele and sing in 7/8,” Steen says, in response to the album’s description. shame is rebutting the misfit, art-rock connotations of the scene they’re most often associated with.

But the quintet did come up in late-2010s South London, where they frequented Brixton’s The Windmill, a hub of the so-called “post-Brexit New Wave.” From a very cursory glance, shame does fit in with the “Windmill Scene,” the pocket of UK bands—like Black Country, New Road, Squid, and the disbanded black midi—whose art-rock has cultivated fanbases of passionate Redditors, hometown faithful, aggregate site pundits, and intercontinental defenders alike. After all, Steen delivers his vocals in a gruff sprechgesang not unlike Geordie Greep’s anxious monologues or former BC,NR member Isaac Wood’s quiver. And like other Windmill alums, shame can come across as sarcastic and sneering. Once, in an interview with The Guardian, they deemed the “rock star” label “offensive.”

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But shame’s association with The Windmill is mostly happenstance, more reflective of geography than a shared ethos or musical approach. If playing the same stages means sharing a likeness, then who’s to argue that shame and a band like Jockstrap aren’t linked as well? It’s silly semantics. Plus, they have always had more swagger and populist appeal than their artsy, proggy peers. The band’s best material is driven by loud, spikey guitar riffs and Steen’s barks. Since its release in 2017, “One Rizla” remains the band’s most popular song, an angsty rock track buoyed by its supremely shoutable chorus (“Well I’m not much to look at / And I ain’t much to hear / But if you think I love you / You’ve got the wrong idea”).

Across their first three albums, shame pivoted between rambunctious, fiery indie rock and knotty post-punk. Their 2018 debut, Songs of Praise, was their most straightforward, capturing the adolescent band as they put their rowdy, pub-tested material to tape for the first time. On 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink and 2023’s Food For Worms, they opened the door to denser arrangements and more somber material—writing about addiction, isolation, and outgrowing their adolescence with disarming empathy. They were more “mature” records, per Steen in 2023. Cutthroat adamantly returns to the mode of Songs of Praise. But, for better or for worse, there’s nothing here with the emotional stakes of 2023’s “Adderall.”

“The last two albums—no dissing them at all, I’m so proud of them—might be a bit more tech-y,” Steen admits. “[They] might be at times a bit slower. And I think we wanted to just switch into gear six now. And take it for a joy ride.” Sean Coyle-Smith agrees, “We wanted an album that–if you’re in your car with your friends—you could put it on and they won’t be like, ‘Are you okay?’ [Cutthroat has] got more of that party feel. It’s easier to digest.” Just thirty seconds into the album, that attitude is obvious. The title track knocks the door down with its colossal one-note riff, and Steen shouts, “Motherfucker, I was born to die!” They might still want the archetype to burn, but on Cutthroat, shame sounds like rockstars.

shame’s focus on making a crowd-pleasing, no-bullshit album came from a healthy sense of competition with their tourmates, Viagra Boys. The headlining tour for Food For Worms felt up to the band’s standards of rowdiness, but once they were on tour with the Swedes, they’d met their match, Coyle-Smith says. Steen agrees, noting that there “wasn’t much competition there. They were fucking good.” “We ended up having a real struggle picking setlists on that tour because we’re known for our raucous live shows,” Coyle-Smith elaborates. “We were playing a lot of songs off the first record, the faster, heavier stuff.” Against Viagra Boys’ irrefutable punk, the wiry, more complex side of shame’s discography never felt quite right. “We ran into trouble, especially with the second album and even a couple of songs from the third album. I fucking loved those songs on the record. But then when it came to making them sound good live, we just could not get it to not feel scrappy.

But the band cannot wait to take Cutthroat for a drive. Earlier this year, they played the album in its entirety at The Windmill. And, even on the venue’s tiny stage, which barely fits all of shame, you could sense their comfort as they ran through every song. With Cutthroat, the quintet can play in the pocket live, in a way that might not be as achievable with the material of 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink. For Coyle-Smith, the Windmill show was a relief: “It was like, ‘Oh this is so easy to fucking play these songs!’ You can go on autopilot and the performance element takes over.” Steen says the record was written with the live setting in mind. “But I would like to think that in the same way I might listen to some of the songs and be like, ‘I’m really excited to play this live,’ somebody might listen to it and be like, ‘Oh, I really want to see this live.’ It’s not just a one-step dance.”

Cutthroat is certainly a “play-it-live” kind of record. Across the runtime, shame do what they do best: deliver brash, burly bangers. There’s “Nothing Better,” where Steen taunts, “That’s why you’re such shit craic at the pub,” to a snooze-fest acquaintance; or the dance-punk “After Party,” which Coyle-Smith wrote when he was ticked off after his bandmates told him to shut up; or the heavy “Screwdriver,” where Steen milks the phrase “life on tick” (a British idiom for paying for something later) across a bed of fuzzed-up guitars. The album even has a few misdirects, like the country-shuffle of “Quiet Life” or “Lampião,” where Steen delivers a spoken-word introduction of its titular Brazilian bandit. Even when they’re outside their comfort zone, shame sound refreshingly straightforward. Windmill purists might disagree, but anthemic sounds good on them.

But it wasn’t only the Viagra Boys tour that pushed shame to trim the fat and make a stage-ready, pedal-to-the-metal album. The band linked with John Congleton, the producer and engineer whose credits read like a greatest hits compilation of the last ten years of indie rock (St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten, Bully). Last year, Congleton co-produced Mannequin Pussy’s I Got Heaven, an album with “straight-to-the-point power,” as Steen puts it. shame wanted to channel some of that, so Congleton put them onto some of his tried-and-true routines. “He set hours. We’d never done that before,” Steen recalls. “It was 10 AM to 7 PM every day. We’d play him the demos, and he would say, ‘Don’t like that bit, don’t like that bit.’ We’d go into the room, flesh out the idea. When we were happy with it, it’d be like, ‘Great, let’s go for some takes.’ Do three takes. And then he was like, ‘That’s it.’” Coyle-Smith calls the producer “incredibly decisive human being,” which was good, because shame is a “very indecisive” band. When recording, Steen admits, he and his mates depend on a “benevolent dictator” producer to call the shots. “If we don’t have this kind of fucking paternal figure, it ain’t going to happen.”

When the band started to overcomplicate the material, Congleton pushed them to simplify. “We like the epic saga songs,” Coyle-Smith admits. “If you really love a particular idea, you just want to make it last. And then you write a new section for it. And then that inspires you to write another new section. And then before you know it, you just created this monster. ‘Screwdriver’ was like that and John was just so confused. He was like, ‘You guys are speaking in your own made-up language when you’re talking about the various different sections of this song.’”

Cutthroat’s fast-and-loose style doesn’t distract from the reality that the five members of shame are growing up. Following the album’s release, they’ll embark on what Coyle-Smith calls “a bit of a monster tour” across Europe and North America. When they started touring Songs of Praise in 2018, the band had a sense of FOMO around partying. “In your head, you’re like, ‘Well, this is probably only going to last so long, so I’ve got to make the most of it while it’s happening,’” Coyle-Smith says. “You’ve got to go out every night, drink every day. And it takes a toll on you very quickly. Steen agrees, “It was like an endurance test.”

shame’s mindset is different now. They’re taking it day by day, even meal by meal. On the road and in the studio, the band depends on each other, Steen says. “We’re fucking married. We’ve all grown up together. I remember Josh said this and it’s true: All of these records are like a little document of our adolescence. We’re very privileged to have that.” That’s the animating force behind all of shame’s albums, whether they’re straight-to-the-point or delightfully off-kilter. No wonder they don’t want to be perceived as “performance art.” shame leave it all out on the stage every night. It’s an energy that just can’t be choreographed.

Andy Steiner is a writer and musician. When he’s not reviewing albums, you can find him collecting ‘80s Rush merchandise. Follow him on Twitter.

Shame Are All Gas, No Brakes

The South London band spoke with Paste about getting into a routine with producer John Congleton, ditching “saga songs” for less complicated hits, and the tour with Viagra Boys that inspired them switch gears on their new album, Cutthroat.