The Tubs

About the show

Upon arriving in the United States for The Tubs’ first tour of the country, frontman Owen Williams

told The New Yorker, “We’re here to unite the country. We’re gonna come, like, three times. By that

point, I think this place will start healing.” Then, joyously, they did just that, piling into a van and

criss-crossing the States, bringing their literary, bleary-eyed, world-weary, night-of-your-life

highwire act to the masses when it was needed most. Along the way, they signed to Merge

Records, who will release The Tubs’ third full-length album, Hard Life, on September 11, 2026.

The Tubs have never lacked for ambition — on Hard Life, theirs is to complicate the Tub-ullar

experience. Having perfected their sound across two albums and hundreds of shows, the London-

based Celtic jangle boyband — Williams (vocals, guitar, keyboards, bass), Dan Lucas (guitar), Taylor

Stewart (drums), and Max Warren (bass) — push themselves even further into the shimmering

heart of virtuosic indie rock. They’re joined by frequent collaborators Lan McArdle (vocals), George

Nicholls (guitar), and Rachel Kenedy (keyboards), all of whom have orbited various Tubs and Gob

Nation-adjacent efforts dating back to Joanna Gruesome, but the secret to Hard Life’s lushness is the

addition of fiddle player Chris Haigh, an instructor and session musician who left an indelible mark

on British pop on Steps’ “5, 6, 7, 8.”

Mirroring Williams' use of trilling on vocal melodies, Haigh’s fiddle shades the vocalist's rueful

croon like a bruise. On “Stoop to Me,” the folkiest, jangliest pop song on the album, Haigh’s licks

complement Williams at his most self-deprecating, the lopsided smile of a guy trying not to let on

how wounded he is in unrequited love. On album opener and title track “Hard Life,” it’s the

sweetness of the ascending fiddle lines in the mix that weds the harshness of Williams’ lyrics to The

Tubs’ fist-pumping anthemics.

The hard line Williams takes here and elsewhere on Hard Life further troubles one’s idea of a Tubs

song. The persona familiar to listeners of Cotton Crown and Dead Meat — to quote Williams, “navel

gazing about romantic abjection, London squalor, and the indignities of grief and OCD” — is still

present, but so too is a second voice, steelier and more experienced. “The second persona doesn’t

have much time for the first,” Williams explains, “often haranguing him for his self-indulgence and

immaturity; sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly.”

It’s the scold who takes center stage on lead single “Who’s Gonna Love You Now?” His questions,

from the titular one to more concrete concerns like “Who’s gonna pay the rent?” existing in mocking

opposition to ideas like moving to the city and really starting to live. Though Williams plays the

crank, the song is a raver, guitars ringing out over an organ-brightened horizon. “It’s your life,”

Williams sings, the life chugging away beneath him sounding exceptionally keen. He wouldn’t have

much sympathy for the lovelorn Williams of “If You Don’t Love Me” — hell, his whole existence

seems like a warning that the kinds of romantic entanglements one suffers when they’re young will

end in loneliness, failure, and an inbox choked with unread Substacks.

On Hard Life, these voices argue, pester one another, merge into each other, and break apart,

sometimes over the course of a single song. They’re two sides of the same coin, people who’ve

experienced grief, disappointment, regret, and shame, emerging from the wreckage as changed

men. “I’m interested in the way sympathy and patience for someone suffering always runs out

eventually,” Williams says. “How this can be a good and liberating thing as well as a sad and brutal

thing. But mostly they’re just pop songs.” Exquisite, irresistible pop songs. Spin them until the

healing starts, then spin them again.