REVIEW: The Bug Club—Very Human Features (2025)
Another 13 finely honed perky indie rock songs revelling in the everyday minutia.
Sub-genre description generally do my head in, as people so love to demarcate things into the tiniest possible pigeon holes to the point of parody. But for The Bug Club, the one that would definitely work would be Revelling in Minutia Indie Rock.
Although they don’t particularly sound like either, they do that very Wedding Present/Half Man-Half Biscuit thing of zoning in on the mundane everyday nonsense, and brain dumping it onto catchy indiepop tunes, with casually brilliant guitar solos thrown in for fun.
Originally on the most brilliantly DIY label possible, Bingo Records, their tremendous output for them attracted the interest of the legendary Sub Pop stable—an unusual fit on the face of it, but certainly eclectic enough to buy into their mission to deliver fizzy indiepop to the masses.
What Sub Pop never have to worry about is The Bug Club having enough songs. Only 10 months on from their label debut, here’s another 13 catchy, spirited numbers charting a course to your heart. What I love about this band is the total and utter lack of pretentiousness. There’s not an atom of studied indie cool about them, which I guess will also turn people off them, if studied cool is your entry requirement. A song called When The Little Choo Choo Train Toots His Little Horn might give you a clue about how much they care about notions of cool. But maybe that makes them cool in their own way. Your mileage will, as ever, vary on such matters.
Both times I’ve caught them live, they just crackle with energy for every second of their allotted stage time, and the chemistry between the two front members is absolute magic, stomping around, in your face, swapping vocals, and quite obviously as match fit a live act as currently exists. They just chop out songs, one after the other, no messing, each one as snacky and delicious as the last.
The only problem, if you can call it that, is they have already amassed so many songs (approaching 100 at this point) is that you don’t really have enough time to steep in an album before the next one is upon us. And then the next time you see them, it’s a whole pile of new material. All good new material, for sure, as this album fully demonstrates, but you have almost no time to have favourites, because all-new favourites come along to displace them.
This gives the band a strange degree of disposability. Like a kind of early Ramones feeling of smashing out great songs within a formula, and then…dishing out new songs within the formula. And, let’s not beat around the bush here, The Bug Club have their quite specific formula—uptempo, rocky, great hooks, telephone voice vocals, massive wonky guitar solos, and consistently Revelling in Minutia.
Very Human Features mostly exists in that familiar space. Although almost all of their songs sound like potential singles, a track like Jealous Boy hits the bullseye of what they do: straight ahead, sweet and crunchy melody, fat-free composition, absolutely no dicking about trying to be clever. They’re direct, and sometimes that’s really what’s required. Their determination to stack similarly rocky gems back to back is like an assault. You’re spun around by the energy of it, so you get Young Reader straight after. In the mosh, there would be no cooldown. Just more bouncing around until you realise just what your jumping around limits really are.
For some reason, the band entirely avoids making promo videos (probably too busy either touring relentlessly, recording, writing songs. Do they ever rest? Doesn’t seem so), though the brilliant KEXP captured them at the end of last year, so if you’ve never seen them in action, this is as good an approximation of what their deal is as exists on the internet. Of course, all the songs here are on the last album, so you’ll have to catch them on one of their upcoming tours to hear what these new ones sound like. The good news is their dedication to playing every corner of the UK means you won’t have to go very far to find them in action—and for not a lot of money either.
