“Cutthroat is a joyride.
It’s for the inexperienced driver. The one who wants to go fast for no reason other than it’s fun.
It’s driven by hunger. Hunger for something better. For something you’ve been told you don’t deserve.
It’s primal. It’s raw. It’s unapologetic. It’s the person who turns up to the party uninvited.
’Cause when you’ve been pushed down, there’s nowhere to go but up. When you ain’t got nothing, you ain’t got nothing to lose.”
- shame
Cutthroat is shame at their blistering best. “It’s about the cowards, the cunts, the hypocrites,” says vocalist Charlie Steen. “Let’s face it, there’s a lot of them around right now.”
An unapologetic new album with Grammy winning producer John Congleton at the helm; it’s souped up and supercharged. It’s exactly where you want shame to be.
Still in their twenties, the five childhood friends - Charlie Steen, guitarists Sean Coyle-Smith and Eddie Green, bassist Josh Finerty and drummer Charlie Forbes - have grown Shame exponentially, with ambitious sonic ideas and the technical chops to execute them.
Having proved themselves several times over with legendary live shows and three critically-acclaimed albums under their belts, Shame went into Cutthroat ready to create a new Ground Zero.
“This is about who we are,” says Steen. “Our live shows aren’t performance art - they’re direct, confrontational and raw. That’s always been the root of us. We live in crazy times. But it’s not about ‘Poor me.’ It’s about ‘Fuck you’.”
Crucial to this incendiary new outlook was producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen). From their initial meeting, Congleton’s no-bullshit approach became a guiding force to streamline the band’s ideas.
Stamped throughout with Shame’s trademark sense of humour, the album takes on the big issues of today and gleefully toys with them. With Trump in the Whitehouse and Shame holed up in Salvation Studios in Brighton, they cast a merciless eye on themes of conflict and corruption; hunger and desire; lust, envy and the omnipresent shadow of cowardice.
Musically, too, the record plays with visceral new ideas. Making electronic music on tour for fun, Coyle-Smith had previously seen the loops he was crafting as a separate entity to the things he wrote for Shame. Then, he realised, maybe they didn’t have to be. “This time, anything could go if it sounded good and you got it right,” he says.
Cutthroat’s first single and title track takes this idea and runs with it into, quite possibly, the best song Shame have ever laid to tape. It’s a ball of barely-contained attitude packed into three minutes of indie dancefloor hedonism. It also masterfully introduces the lyrical outlook of the record: one where cocksure arrogance and deep insecurity are two sides of the same coin.
“I was reading a lot of Oscar Wilde plays where everything was about paradox,” Steen explains. “In ‘Cutthroat’, it’s that whole idea from Lady Windermere’s Fan, ‘Life’s far too important to be taken seriously’.”
‘Spartak’ rolls in on an Americana-flecked country lilt (“I was basically trying to write a Wilco song,” Coyle-Smith chuckles). This song holds one of the main themes of the record, criticising cliques and pack-mentality.
It sets its crosshairs on the social climbers; the people at the party always looking over your shoulder trying to find someone more important.
“I guess this disdain towards cliques comes from how shit I was made to feel by the cool kids growing up.” Says Steen, “ I was a chubby teenager who liked the wrong type of music and wore the wrong type of clothes.”
“It’s just another time I’d like to say fuck you to those people, and to anyone who makes someone feel shitty for not fitting in.” Steen says with a smile on his face.
Album highlight ‘Quiet Life’, the first spark in the Cutthroat writing process, is delivered via a snarling Rockabilly riff, influenced by the tone and attitude of such bands as The Gun Club and The Cramps.
“‘Quiet Life’ is about someone in a shitty relationship. It’s about the judgment they receive and the struggle that they have to go through, trying to understand the conflict they face, of wanting a better life… but being stuck.”
‘Lampião’ goes where Shame have never gone before, as Steen sings in Portuguese about the polarising Brazilian bandit - a hero to some, a murderer to others.
“My girlfriend is Brazilian and I was in São Paulo with her parents,” Steen says. “Her mum told me about this famous bandit, Lampião, and his wife, Maria Bonita. They’re like Bonnie and Clyde over there, and just as famous.
“It seemed crazy to me how nobody in London seemed to know who they were, so I wanted to write this sort of folk-song about them, condensing their story. The song that I’m singing in the chorus was actually written by one of the bandits in Lampião’s crew, Volta Seca.”
‘After Party’ underpins Steen’s spitting delivery with unsettling, tremulous synths that then break into a wryly chirpy chorus before closer, ‘Axis of Evil’, sends Shame into a whole new thrilling dimension. Channelling the prowling, lusty electronics of Depeche Mode, it’s like nothing the band have done before.
This cheeky self-awareness, too, is important. As much as Shame want to burst the bubbles of bluster and ego, encouraging us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, ‘He who casts the first stone…’, they also understand that, at its heart, life is often ridiculous.
“You never know when you’re gonna go, so make it count while you’re still here,” Steen shrugs. “Every good Catholic kid like myself might have fallen asleep every night with a crucified Jesus on their wall. Maybe that has something to do with it as well…”
The result is an album that revels in the idiosyncrasies of life, raising an eyebrow and asking the ugly questions that so often get tactfully brushed over.
“I’m not here to answer the questions, I’m a 27-year-old idiot…” Steen caveats with a self-effacing chuckle. But the one answer that Cutthroat gives with a resounding flourish is that, right now, Shame have never sounded better.