ALBUM REVIEW: mclusky – i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley EP

Released: 01.05.26

Off the back of their perfectly fine 2025 album The World Is Still Here and So Are We, mclusky have released a follow-up EP, which is more taut, more vitriolic and more focused. It’s a berserkly succinct thing, running through six breakneck songs, and a longer one, in about fifteen minutes. Pithy one liners litter the record, with musings on late-stage capitalism, technology, fatherhood and the General State Of Things, blurred through surreal obfuscation (“In the piranha was another piranha / and in the piranha was another piranha” is the refrain of As A Dad) or addressed through pithy directness. In I Know Computer we are asked: “Want things? Pay the price?” before Andrew Falkous scoffs “Nah!”. Ultimately, this record embodies the same spiky tension of their earlier records and shares the sonic qualities that made those records great: Falkous oscillating from deadpan to deranged from line to line.

It’s a shame they couldn’t quite capture the same lighting in jar energy on their last LP; heck, it can feel exhausting for the listener, but it does represent a renewed sense of purpose and fire for the band who, in many respects, feel like they’ve never been away.