Mclusky : i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley
There aren’t many bands capable of defining themselves as a spectacularly unhinged noise-punk act in the early noughties, unceremoniously splitting up, and then hopping back onto the scene an entire two decades later to drop a brand new album that’s every bit as fierce and frenetic as their very first releases were. But then, there aren’t many bands who are Mclusky. Demonstrating without a doubt that they are far from being out of steam following last year’s the world is still here and so are we, their latest EP, i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley, could be described in a variety of ways, though perhaps most succinctly as a victory lap.
The first sound to which we are treated on this collection of six brief tracks is a grunting, angular riff featuring that beautiful Mclusky bass tone to which existing musical adjectives cannot hope to do justice. It’s thudding, metallic, dirty, and scrappy—cutting and unclean in a way that somehow seems to sit on the same grimy level of the psyche from which vocalist Andrew Falkous derives his darkly surreal lyricism. And rest assured, this EP is home to plenty of that; i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley offers a potent mix of lyrics that range from politically subversive but earnest rallying cries to finely-tuned nonsense that makes little sense to your brain, though quite a lot to the pit of your stomach.
The opening line (indeed, the very title) of track four, “hi! we’re on strike,” for example, is not difficult to parse for meaning: “My boss says I am late / Am I late / Am I late if I dispute the concept of a boss?” But we quickly take a turn toward the bizarre in the next stanza as Falkous confesses that “My wife says I am in Body Count / I am not / I do not know how she got that idea.” “spock culture” takes a swipe at the way an all-consuming nostalgia-worship has entered our culture in the past decade or so as a means of numbing the horrors of rapacious capitalism, while the closing track, “that was my brain on elves,” is perhaps the most well-crafted mixture of the idiotic and the insightful that the new release has to offer. “I realized the things that we buy are an island / And that’s where I want to be buried,” Falkous croons in a surprisingly subdued, melancholy tune, commenting, perhaps on the maddening pedestal upon which consumerism sits in the modern world. He continues to say that “I understood finally that animals have feelings / But not in a way they can monetize.” But not to worry; “that was my brain on elves,” he explains. “That was my brain on object permanence.”
The implication here seems to be that there’s nothing quite so insane or fantastical as real life. Looking around at the state of the world that is discussed on i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley, it becomes increasingly hard to deny that Mclusky might have a point. The music is chaotic, unstable, and dizzyingly relentless. Doesn’t that make it the perfect companion piece to reality?
Label: Ipecac
Year: 2026
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Mclusky : i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley
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