The Tubs
Hard Life
MERGE
On 2025’s Cotton Crown, the second album from London quartet The Tubs, vocalist Owen Williams painfully chronicled his mother’s death by suicide. So when he tells you with the title of the band’s third album that life is hard, you know he’s not just a sad sack—he comes by his doom and gloom honestly. But even more than Cotton Crown, the new album finds considerable charm and combustible energy in its intersection of bleakness and pep; in the way Williams’ melancholy lyrics push back against the band’s joyful riffs, earworm hooks, and locomotive grooves.
If you can tell a lot from the title, you can tell just as much from the album’s cover: the surroundings are grown-over and a little bit grey, the band members look collegiate and a little bit schlubby. It’s an image that can’t help recall an across-the-pond variant of R.E.M.’s creeping kudzu, or of The Smiths’ eternally depressive college rock. Both influences are prominent here—the propulsive jangle of the first single, “Who’s Gonna Love You Now?,” chimes gloriously—but so is the folksy underpinnings of groups like 10,000 Maniacs, or the high-and-lonesome Celtic romance of The Waterboys. “Heaven or London” combines spindly riffs with raucous punk energy, while “Didn’t I Say?” is a nasty sing-along made all the more pungent by Williams’ Richard Thompson bur. There’s even some lite-funk in “Do Yourself a Favor,” a Prince obscurity that fits in just fine among these college rock signifiers. The latter song incorporates chirpy synths, but most tracks choose doleful fiddle for their ornamentation.
The lyrics here aren’t as narratively heavy as the ones heard on Cotton Crown, but there’s still plenty of misery and misanthropy to go around. The misery is mostly of the romantic variety; a telling song title is “Stoop to Me,” where Williams can’t imagine the object of his affection swooning over him but would settle for her grudging condescension. And the misanthropy is almost always directed inward, usually in ways that are darkly funny and self-referential. In “Heaven or London,” Williams derides himself as “the singer of a rip-off band,” whose life involves “wanking himself into an early grave.” It can be hard to know whether to laugh or cringe.
Yet it’s exactly this force of personality, this idiosyncratic perspective, that keeps The Tubs from being just a rip-off band. Their influences are well-curated, but they’re also channeled into music that’s deeply felt, almost uncomfortably human, and committed to expressing a particular point of view. There’s no resting on nostalgia here—just one of our best young bands using classic touchpoints to speak timeless truths: life is hard, but you might as well sing along.
