Issue 03 · BAD TAKES 03 · 6 October 2026
Four records with somewhere to come from
New releases, human histories and a deliberately unreliable set of filing instructions.
Four release notes and listening invitations, with the final verdict left to the ears. The records have places, people and histories behind them. Those seem worth paying attention to in an edition about confident approximation.
Soft Cell: Danceteria
Soft Cell’s sixth and final studio album arrived on 25 September. Marc Almond’s official material places it in the world of early-eighties New York, and the release follows the loss of Dave Ball. “The Rainbow Room” is one route into that setting; the title track offers another.
There is something affecting about a final record returning to the rooms where a partnership found its possibilities. Nostalgia can be a lazy selling point, but a place also contains the particular people, accidents and appetites that made a band possible. No amount of competent synthesis can give a different artist that history. The useful listening question is whether the songs make the place live again, rather than simply name it.
We would begin with the singles, then give the album room to establish its own ending. “Final” is context. It should not do all the reviewing.
File under: one last drink in a club that closed forty years ago.
Gilla Band: Pugnello
The Dublin quartet’s new album was released through Rough Trade on 25 September. Their own account describes a record emerging from the four members’ separate projects and their return to work together. Their account emphasises an approach that does not sit comfortably inside one familiar category.
What interests us here is the refusal to treat recognisability as a defect. Gilla Band’s particular combination of people and processes is the point of going to their record rather than requesting a plausible noise-rock album from a machine. The listening question is what each member contributes to the whole: where repetition becomes structural, where the vocal changes our reading of the sound and where the music refuses the easier route.
We can read plenty about an abrasive record without experiencing its abrasion. Put this one on somewhere that permits a difficult answer.
File under: eight office printers awaiting disciplinary action.
Julia Jacklin: The Gem
The Gem is Jacklin’s fourth studio album and her first for 4AD, released on 25 September. That is the factual introduction. Everything important about whether it works has to happen at the other end of the speakers.
For this issue, the attraction is the difference between producing an intimate voice and being a person with something intimate to communicate. One is a reproducible surface. The other depends on choices: which thought is admitted, which phrase remains plain and what the song allows to be uncomfortable. A record can be beautifully restrained and still avoid saying anything; it can be messy and reach us precisely because something has escaped the polish.
That is a question to bring to Jacklin’s songs, rather than a verdict to impose before hearing them. Does the arrangement open space for the thought, or tell us what to feel about it? The answer belongs to the record.
File under: a notebook with room left for a change of mind.
The Yummy Fur: Everybody Talks About the Weather
Upset The Rhythm describes this as the Glasgow band’s first collection of new material in more than 27 years. The release brings together John McKeown, Brian MacDougall and Paul Thomson, with references drawn from art, literature and the disorder of ordinary life.
The label’s notes point to “Cogs”, “Unity Over Europe” and “My Lasagne”, among other tracks. Their mixture of subjects makes a useful antidote to the instruction that every creative work should settle neatly on one immediately marketable theme. A thought can travel sideways. A song can contain references without becoming an examination paper. Whether the movement is exhilarating or merely crowded is something to discover by listening.
A reunion is interesting when the people have a reason to interrupt the present, rather than simply exhibit the past. That is the test we would bring to this one.
File under: three art books and a lasagne nobody remembers ordering.