May 2026
i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley: Mclusky
After twenty years without records, now they’re making up for it greatly.
There aren’t many bands capable of defining themselves as a spectacularly unhinged noise-punk act in the early noughties, splitting up unceremoniously, then hopping back two decades later and dropping a record every bit as fierce as their first ones. But Mclusky have always operated on their own terms, and i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley is just the latest proof that those terms have nothing to do with taking it easy.
Let’s set the scene. The World Is Still Here and So Are We, their fourth studio album, landed on 9 May 2025 through Ipecac Recordings and landed hard. It was greeted with something close to euphoria. Critics who had quietly mourned the band’s 2005 split suddenly had nowhere to hide their joy. On Metacritic it pulled an 82 out of 100, landing in “universal acclaim” territory from 12 critic reviews. Not bad for a band that had been out of the game for most of a generation.
Then, barely ten months later, this.
Six Tracks and No Apologies
i sure am getting sick of this bowling alley dropped digitally on March 20, 2026, with vinyl to follow on May 1. The record features four new songs and two that are not so new, marking their second release on Ipecac Recordings. Two of the tracks, “spock culture” and “hi! we’re on strike,” were recorded during the the world is still here sessions but didn’t make the album. Two others, “fan learning difficulties” and “that was my brain on elves,” had only received a digital release before, making their vinyl debut here.
But here’s the thing about calling them leftovers: these are Mclusky leftovers. The stuff that didn’t fit a 13-track record because even they have limits. On this EP they find a freer, more unhinged home, less constrained by the sequencing demands of a full-length, more willing to sprawl and mutate inside their own tightly wound universe.
Math rock has no signifiers other than its sound. Grunge had flannel shirts, Doc Martens, long hair. Math rock had none of that. Standing almost completely outside of a larger culture ensured, paradoxically, that it would never go entirely out of style.
Falkous explained the speed of the release in his own fashion: “we can’t stop writing, at least at the moment. it’s fun (that’s all it needs to be). only death will slow us down. note: it won’t stop us.”
That’s not marketing copy. That’s just who he is.
The Man in the Room
After about a decade of sporadic activity, Mclusky began playing shows again with new bassist Damien Sayell of The St. Pierre Snake Invasion. Sayell’s arrival is what made this whole second chapter possible and credible. He is not a replacement for what was lost when the original lineup dissolved. He is something more interesting: a genuine fan of the band who brings the outside perspective that Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone, trapped inside their own timeline, simply cannot have on their own work.
As Falkous put it, Damien is “ultimately the gatekeeper of what is and isn’t Mclusky because he was a fan of the band, whereas Jack and I have never seen the band live.” That is a strange and useful truth. It means every song gets filtered through someone who knows what it should feel like to hear Mclusky from the outside. On the album, all tracks were written by Sayell, Egglestone, and Falkous together. The creative democracy is real.
On the EP, Sayell’s bass is front and center from the first seconds. The first sound is a grunting, angular riff featuring that Mclusky bass tone to which existing musical adjectives cannot hope to do justice. That is not hyperbole. It is a very specific kind of physical weight, and it carries the whole record.
Fourteen Minutes of Wry Catastrophe
The new songs
“i know computer” opens with a muscular, rumbling sound, the bass and drumming reminiscent of Rollins Band in the early nineties, a solid anchor to start from. According to press material, “i know computer” might even surface on the next Mclusky album, which the band have said is already half-recorded. So what sounds like a throwaway is actually a preview.
“as a dad” takes a bluesier angle. It has a twang that recalls Bob Log III and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, with an early B-52s campiness that gives it a joyful, off-kilter energy.
The banal evil of cushy computer jobs, depletion of natural resources, and nostalgia as toxic stagnation are all targets at which the band takes aim, but they attack them as if throwing tomatoes that hide pipe bombs. That is exactly the trick Falkous has always managed. The joke lands, then the bruise shows up later.
The session survivors
“spock culture” is more angular in tone, with hints of The Fall, especially in Falkous’s sardonic delivery. It is the most overtly Mclusky-sounding track on the record. “hi! we’re on strike” uses a robotic vocal quality to reflect workplace frustration, and the music beneath it carries the tension of no-wave and post-punk without ever feeling like a history lesson.
“fan learning difficulties” truly comes to life at its midpoint, when it lurches into harried freefall. The line Falkous delivers at the start of the simmer, “Americans think that they live in America,” lands whether read as a commentary on fan entitlement or American exceptionalism, or both. Either way, it is as loud as anything they have ever written.
Closing track “that was my brain on elves” goes somewhere else entirely: a mellow, stripped-down, folksy finish whose lyrical eccentricities echo Robyn Hitchcock and Syd Barrett, proving the band can close a door quietly when they choose to.
The Bigger Picture
NPR called their return “progressive, weird, snotty post-punk with a real sense of humor and grandiosity.” That sentence has aged well. What Mclusky are doing right now, well into their second chapter, is proving that momentum is not a thing you store and retrieve. You generate it by working. The record started as a stopgap to promote their North American tour, but it became something else: a trio capitalizing on the momentum of their critically acclaimed full-length and refusing to let it dissipate.
Fourteen minutes. Six tracks. No padding, no filler, no reverential self-mythology. The music is chaotic, unstable, and dizzyingly relentless, which makes it a fitting companion to the world it describes.
For a band that spent twenty years not making records, they are making up for lost time in the best possible way.