Posts Tagged ‘Smutclub Ldn’

18th September 2026

Laaandaaan! Init? Heart of rock ‘n’ roll shizz… well, perhaps when Britpop was all the rage, but the new generation is seemingly more likely to turn up and sweep your doorstep with a dustpan and brush than to puke on it while staggering home from a club at 2:30am. There are good reasons for this: they may well be pissed off with the state of everything, because everything’s shit, just as it was in the 90s and 00s when grunge and nu-metal were all the rage – and rage is indeed the word – but they’ve been told repeatedly to quit the lattes and smashed avocado toasts if they want to get on the property ladder. It’s pretty rich advice from people who could spend Friday night down the pub and go on holiday (without feeling guilty over contributing to climate change) and still buy a house for just four times their salary. Put another way, the grunge and nu-metal revivals have been driven by the same shit conditions which inspired nihilistic anger thirty and forty years ago, only now the conditions are actually shitter.

In the face of that, what do you do? How do you even keep going on a day-to-day basis? Wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, and everything just gets shitter by the day. But do SmutClub Ldn want to break stuff? Maybe, but for this single release, SmutClub Ldn go light: as we learn, ‘Limp Bizkoff is all about appreciating time with your friends, while playfully “begrudging” duties like having to clean up the mess. The climax of the song encapsulates the joy of a good tea and snacks gathering with your loved ones around you’. I mean, Biscoff is in itself pretty middle class, but then so is owning musical instruments these days, and, I dunno, having the heating on or affording new clothes.

‘Limp Bizkoff’ is pretty heavy, sonically., with three minutes chunky, chugging, nu-metal grind. The chords hit like slabs of concrete, the churn in harsh and heavy, there are discordant notes and sinewy chimes from the spindly guitar. Lyrically, it’s altogether lighter, providing an unusual juxtaposition. Good clean fun, yes, but… first world issues for sure. And not only is dunking biscuits grim, it leaves a crumb sludge in the mug, which is even grimmer.

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Smutclub Ldn Promo image

31st July 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

We really do seem to be experiencing a Nu-Metal renaissance right now. And of all the genres I would have put money on sinking without trace, it’s Nu-Metal, which felt like a flash-in-the-pan fad in the late 90s. The idea of crossing rap and metal wasn’t entirely new even then. Aerosmith’s collaboration with Rum DMC may have sown the seeds, but it was most definitely a meeting of rock and rap. The collaborations which featured on the Judgement Night soundtrack in 1993, however, very much brought rap and metal together, and set the precedent for what Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park would go on to do. Helmet and House of Pain? Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.? Slayer and Ice T? These were some fierce collisions of rap and metal. This was radical. But that was 1993 – and what a time to be alive! And now it’s 2026. Thirty-three years have elapsed. Holy shit. It’s not exactly ‘nu’ anymore. Is it? Perhaps it’s time for a rebrand. And since we’ve had Post-punk and even The New Wave of New Wave, how about Nu-Nu Metal, or ‘The Nu-Metal Revival’ or ‘The Nu-Metal Renaissance’?

But while the Nu-Metal scene of the late 90s was dominated by blokes venting versions of adolescent rage (although Fred Durst was nearing 30 when Limp Bizkit released their debut album, and there always felt like a sense of arrested development hung around the genre – older guys making records for disaffected teens), the current scene is altogether more diverse, and most significantly, we’re seeing female-fronted acts like Eville breaking through and kicking arse.

Smutclub Ldn share some common ground with Eville, as is happens, with whacked-out pop autotune colliding with skull-crunching riffs. And as such, ‘Elephant’ is a brain-melting identity crisis of a single: clocking it at precisely three minutes, it’s a mental mash-up of nu-metal, emo, and pop, all brought together and heated under compression, with explosive results.

The verse riff is a gnarly, churning beast which chugs and undulates menacingly, the chorus sounds like it belongs to a completely different song, and the breaks and bridges are something else again. How do you switch between hands-in the-air anthem and brutal slam-dancing and back again, and again, in just three minutes? ‘Elephant’ is positively schizophrenic, and love it or hate it, it’s the most inventive thing you’re likely to hear in 2026.

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Smutclub Ldn Promo image 1