It’s been a long, hard road out of London for sonic shapeshifters Bad Fractals. With roots stretching way back to 2012, it would be something of an understatement to say their debut album The Sea Sang Screaming is overdue. Proving that good things do come to those who wait, that album was finally recorded and produced by Youth (Killing Joke) and Michael Rendall in 2023, and since then has been fermenting like a bottle of champagne. It’s cork finally gets popped in 2026 and the result is an intoxicating ten track album with plenty of fizz and bubbles that tickle the nose (and eardrums).

You have to wonder if Bad Fractals’ debut album was delayed by divine intervention; with the Earth looking like it might be nuked at any moment and life becoming a struggle for all but the super rich, what the world needs more that ever is a kick-ass rock band. Enter stage left Bad Fractals and their vivacious debut The Sea Sang Screaming. When the needle connects with the groove of opening track ‘Bee Sting’, it feels like a perfect case of serendipity and this album has dropped at exactly the right time. Darting around and deftly avoiding easy categorisation, ‘Bee Sting’ is a spiky, drug-addled, dangerous slab of rock n’ roll; imagine The Who Sings My Generation and Never Mind The Bollocks placed in a particle collider, then filtered through the acidic vision of David Lynch and the drunken wisdom of Mark E Smith, and you’d have something approaching the chutzpah of ‘Bee Sting’ and The Sea Sang Screaming.

You could say that Bad Fractals have an appetite for deconstruction and these songs offer sharp lyrical insights that cut to the quick of the human condition. ‘Disco Devils’ unravels the whole predatory nature of celebrity and cheap sexual liaisons (“I’m like a Lamborghini, if you drink Lambrini”), whilst ‘What You Looking At?’ does a similar thing with drunken violence. Bad Fractals are just as adaptable musically and serve up a sound that bounces around like a silver ball between the bumpers, ‘1/2 Price Paradise’ being particularly disorientating and ‘Walk Of Shame’ suitably sinister. It is an approach to music that gives Bad Fractals an exorbitant amount of freedom and they put it to good use on The Sea Sang Screaming. Whilst each of these ten tracks are instantly recognisable as belonging to Bad Fractals, they are each markedly different and it renders this the kind of album that has a self-propelled motion.

This is undoubtedly a rock n’ roll album, yet it successfully sidesteps all the usual tropes and cliches, and as such The Sea Sang Screaming is not only an album of our age, but a record for all time.

• The Sea Sang Screaming is released via Creation Youth on 15th May 2026 (available here).

Track List:

1. Bee Sting
2. Disco Devils
3. What You Looking At?
4. Dirty White Toads
5. Chemical Weddings
6. 1/2 Price Paradise
7. FreeRange
8. Strike!
9. Walk Of Shame
10. Taxman