Emptying the Clip
But then they did
Off-Menu: O’JOY! — Big Special
SO Recordings · June 5, 2026 · @bigspecial_ · bigspecial.co.uk
My knowledge of British post-punk is thin. There’s too much music in the world to feel bad about the gaps. So when this one landed in my inbox I wasn’t entirely sure it was going to be my thing.
It was my thing.
Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney are from the Black Country — a stretch of the West Midlands named for the soot and smoke from two centuries of ironworks and coal mines. It’s the kind of place that makes a certain kind of music. Hicklin screams poetry. Moloney hits things. Somehow this produces sounds that feel less like post-punk from the English Midlands and more like a Southern Gothic revival meeting that got lost on its way to the Mississippi Delta. I don’t fully understand how. I’ve stopped needing to.
O’JOY! is out June 5 via SO Recordings. If you want context on where these songs came from, go listen to Postindustrial Hometown Blues and National Average first and think: this didn’t make the cut for that. What’s left makes its own thing.
It’s dedicated to the memory of their friend Handsome James Borrer.
The record opens with a spoken fragment — automated, distorted, no music underneath it. Just a voice and static:
What you have taken / will give you more than you were ever after / and the weight will pull you down to the rock of the earth / and you shall become it.
Then a creaking gate hinge. Then you’re in.
Plaintive Native arrives like something drifting from a bar on a Louisiana back road — synth drums, a banjo that has no business being this funky, Hicklin in spoken-word mode. Around the three-minute mark it drops into something more open. Proselytizing without a congregation: what do you care about / what are you allowed to care about / do you even care? Nobody responds. That’s the point.
Only Free When Sleeping opens on a saxophone hook and immediately sets a different temperature — lazy drum, greasy. True Blood without the vampires. A hymnal repetition builds until it stops — hard cut, no resolution. The lyric does the work the music refuses to finish:
You’re only free when you’re sleeping.
Oblivion as the only available exit. Cheerful stuff.
Lazarus is a church service. Not a metaphor — choir, organ, a preacher stepping in when the congregation pauses. The resurrection myth runs in reverse: stay down Lazarus / no new beginning / born digging / get digging. Somewhere in there a seagull catches fire, thinks “fuck it,” and that’s the most accurate description of late capitalism I’ve encountered this year.
The Wake strips everything back — a pissed-off goose of a horn, a guitar with real solitude in the picking, and a lyric that is simultaneously a literal wake and a eulogy for something cultural that got killed by television, the internet, and whatever came after. Nobody can quite remember what it was or when it died. But things have been different since.
This one requires multiple listens. I say that as a warning.
Family Bones opens on a bass line that would rattle the spoiler off a 1994 Mercury Tracer. The discomfort is physical before it’s intellectual. Midway it shifts into something orchestrated and strange — the audio equivalent of binaural beats on YouTube, except instead of calming you down it resonates specifically with your unease. A rotten apple fell and rolled four generations down. That’s the whole track in ten words.
Garden of Fools opens with flute — brave or deranged depending on your tolerance for unexpected woodwinds — and builds into something that functions like a sea shanty. A communal song for people who’ve had their tools and their hands taken. The flute gives way to trumpet halfway through. That’s not an accident. Flute is private grief. Trumpet is what you do with it.
Sluglife is the left turn. Warm acoustic guitar, a delivery closer to Baz Luhrmann’s sunscreen speech than anything post-punk, and a lyric about performing okayness for the neighbors while your spirit has a ruptured spleen. I just need a little time / we’re getting there. He says it three times. It starts to sound less like reassurance and more like something he’s trying to convince himself of.
Dragged Up a Hill (and Thrown Down the Other Side) is exactly what it says. Desolate, honest, unhurried. Builds toward something in the final stretch then asks a question it’s no longer sure about: is anything truly yours / is anything real. Shrugs. Keeps going.
Hotel opens with an automated phone system — hotel front desk energy — and then Hicklin just says it: this song is about depression. No metaphor. No runway. Then the peppiest beat on the entire record kicks in, which is either the most British response to mental illness I’ve ever encountered or the most honest one. Probably both.
We’re all living in a hotel room / high above the doom and gloom / but we’re gonna be leaving soon.
Temporary. All of it. The record ends there, and it lands.
I’m not sure if this record hit me because of where I am right now or because of where everything is right now. Maybe that’s the same question.
What I know is that a band from a sooty corner of the English Midlands made something that sounds like it came out of a delta church in 1962 and a hotel room in 2026 simultaneously, and the gap between those two things is exactly where this record lives.
The clip is empty. Whatever they make next is going to be something.
Big Special’s O’JOY! is out June 5 via SO Recordings. North American tour this fall — headline shows in DC (Oct 7, Pearl Street Warehouse), Brooklyn (Oct 8, Baby’s All Right), and Boston (Oct 9, The Rockwell), plus dates supporting Lambrini Girlz through the midwest and southeast. @bigspecial_