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Oct 6, 2025With the help of super-producer John Congleton, shame created a new blistering, no-nonsense sound. These 12 songs are face-melting, immersive, clunky in the best way possible, and more than anything, they’re wildly cathartic. .... It is the arrangement behind these words that drills their points into your soul.
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Oct 6, 2025This fourth album is undoubtedly a return to something: full of raw, barely restrained bite, it’s as if they’ve taken all the sparky, unself-conscious vigour of their 2018 debut and, in their relative maturity, learned to wield it even more potently. Ever the rabble-rousing ringleader, Charlie Steen is on vintage lyrical form.
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Oct 6, 2025The result is shame’s most thrilling work yet, an album that takes the essence from Songs of Praise and turns it into a more mature, fully developed version, proving how much the band has evolved in the seven years since their debut.
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Oct 6, 2025Often heavy in terms of lyrical context, in turn comes equal measures of humour: it’s difficult not to hark back to the tear away trousers with golden booty shorts underneath which Steen dons live onstage: ‘Cutthroat’ feels equally cheeky and to the point.
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Oct 6, 2025By the time ‘Axis of Evil’ rolls around to close things out, you feel as though you’ve been given the fullest scope yet of what the band are capable of.
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UncutOct 6, 2025While there's a little less shouting than usual going on, a more laconic American influence serves the well when Charlie Steen's drawl lends the title track's electro-pop textures a Dandy Warhols feel, and "Lampiao" channels an LCD-style tale of gangster mythology. [Nov 2025, p.36]
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Oct 6, 2025While Cutthroat may be a bit disjointed, it's not because Shame are indecisive. They continue to push and invent, even when it might be safer not to. Sometimes the results are thrilling, sometimes they're frustrating, but they're never cowardly.
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Oct 6, 2025It’s this ambivalence, when present – mock-empowerment or satirical glibness versus a dire knowing that the social divides are getting bigger – that fuels the album’s best takes.
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Oct 22, 2025There are hints of Shame’s continuous evolution as songwriters. Take the muted, jagged menace lurking behind the austere “Packshot,” which builds into a powerful, guitar-driven crescendo. But for the most part, Cutthroat struggles at balancing that very fine line between accessibility and experimentation.
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Record CollectorOct 6, 2025John Congleton's production energises the festival-ready ructions of Cowards Around, though the indifferent arrangements of Quiet Life and Nothing Better struggle to distinguish Shame's snapshots of suburban frustration. [Oct 2025, p.133]