Opus Kink take us through ‘The Sweet Goodbye’ track by track

Brighton post-punkers Opus Kink properly arrived last month with their excellent debut album The Sweet Goodbye.

The band’s debut is a kaleidoscopic success and sees them coming good on their early promise, with a set of songs which prove to be as unpredictable as they are exciting.

Now, they’ve detailed the whole record in an exclusive track by track for Rolling Stone UK.

Come Over, Do Me Wrong

In a windowless room in the dread heat of summer, our bassist Sam wrote a riff on the guitar. It was in the key of A minor.  It sounded like a shocking Arctic Monkeys B-side so we naturally shelved it. Then one day our louche musketeer of a saxophonist had the clemency to blow the selfsame riff on his horn and lo, a song was yanked feet-first and gurgling into this vale of tears. ‘Come Over, Do Me Wrong’ adds a touch of undeniable class to our repertoire and sounds vaguely like Ethiopian jazz if you suspend your disbelief entirely. It’s about not particularly minding being crushed to near-death by the potent thighs of love. Very teen dream. One for our submissive listeners. We recorded an awful version and then a wonderful one in the wintertime at Fish Factory Studios with two pairs of socks and gloves on. I had scabies at the time. It was all quite method. Three chords and the truth!

Will It Come For You?  

This one started life as a Magazine-esque riff and chord sequence written by Jazz, the keyboard player. We gigged a grossly engorged six-minute punk version for a while before refining it under the dainty iron fist of Craig Silvey into the frankly poptastic bounder you hear today. Miraculously, adding a juddering synth loop under the groove made it sound not like ska which gave cause for much celebration. Many cowards and lazy listeners have accused us of ska in the past, may they all perish… the lyric was inspired by a lazy and cowardly appropriation of Kafka’s short story ‘In The Penal Colony’ and the zeitgeisty worry that one will not find one’s place in the World and that said World will get to you and dash you before that happens anyway. Easy Listening for anxious hypochondriacs who get their news on Instagram.

I’m A Pretty Showboy

The first track we recorded with Craig at Fish Factory and the first single released before ‘The Sweet Goodbye’ was announced in early 2026. It grew out of a very old groove from a song called ‘Doing It Myself’ we used to play in 2018 which has thankfully been consigned to history. It’s beloved by us and our doting fans as the straight up and down rock and roll tune of the record, notwithstanding the big band horn arrangement, Black Sabbath breakdown and modal-folk ending refrain inspired by ‘The Snake With Eyes of Garnet’ and Samuel Beckett. I think I described it in one interview as being about ‘gyrating in the void’ which is typically emo and grandiose but has served the track well. Making meaning in a meaningless world! That’s what they’re all about in the end. When we play it live I like to do a verbatim impression of Elvis freestyling the intro to a version of ‘Polk Salad Annie’ he played in the Vegas years so as to properly blue-ball the circle pit during the breakdown.

The Sweet Goodbye

The meeting of West and East! The long-awaited fusion of John Wayne giddy-up Ghost Rider guitars and the valiant tones of the Red Army Choir! I wrote this one very quickly in my flat and the band really did a hot number on it. Jazz’s addition of metallic junkyard percussion and Jack’s succulent Flugelhorn solo in the waltz section are the creamiest accomplices. For the waltzing baritone choir we layered up a million takes of everyone doing the chest-voice-chin-face while trying to imagine bidding farewell to our spartan Soviet wives for the last time (this was accentuated by a take from studio assistant Harry, who, it transpires, is an actual baritone in The Opera). This song – which is about America, or making art, or clocktower mass-shooters, or polishing a Fender Jaguar – also features the voices of producer Craig Silvey and engineer Dani Spragg as congratulatory arcade sprites. Dani’s immaculate rendition of ‘GREAT SHOT’ was the very last thing laid down on this record before we finally gave up and went to Angie’s for seven thousand pints of plain.

Peckham Nocturne

There was ALMOST an instrumental track on this record but I couldn’t help myself and covertly rasped one very small verse into a dangling room mic while everyone else went looking for a Chinese in the pissing rain. Taking a cue from Earle Hagen’s ‘Harlem Nocturne’ (mainly the Lounge Lizards version) and evoking a thousand nights drinking, worrying and working in Peckham. Notes of burnt meat, urine, linden trees, rum, fag ash and the audacity of incumbent middle-class students and musicians. Such as I. Derived from a melody I wrote when I was about 18, so the oldest tune on the album by a long shot. Also our desperate bid for sync opportunities; we hope to hear Peckham Nocturne as the theme for a hot new Netflix period action drama and to reap the rewards therein.

I Have To Shine My Sunday Shoes

Written in the now-dead/turned into a bathroom for an orange wine bar Baxter Studios (a windowless cupboard in Lewes where Sam & I sketched out most of these songs and where he taught people how to play Smoke On the Water) and punished by many iterations and rewrites, this tune is a blast to play live, it’s so simple yet so crowded… It attempts to reconcile William Onyeabor, Chas’n’Dave, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and the Velvets. Whether you think that sounds divine or repulsive you will mow go forth and listen to it. We chanced on that synth-bass groove when deep in a lost session pissing about with ungodly vintage machines in the studio. Lyrically it’s a consensus of celebration and commiseration. We came down from the trees, fell to our knees and now we’re walking to the corner shop… that’s the whole of life right there. And so we must do what we can whilst lying supine.

The Head Tree ft The New Eves

Probably the biggest departure on the record, sound-wise, Crucify notwithstanding. An actual fat dance tune about Alice Molland, the last witch to be tried and hanged in England, and her equally unfortunate contemporaries Mary Trembles, Temperance Lloyd and Susannah Edwards. We were driving through the titular town of Heavitree after a show in Exeter and searched up the lore, apparently their bodies are said to be buried under a car park somewhere, probably the local Aldi. A canny legacy. We wrote the verse melodies with the New Eves in mind, we love that band and all their various other projects and they brought some definitive ancient rage to the tune. The chorus’ and horn parts are some hideous confusion of BeeGees, ABBA and other such rich pastures. The poem that Nina Winder-Lind reads at the end over the freakout section is from ‘ Cad Goddeu’, a medieval Welsh poem that translates to ‘The Battle of The Trees’. An ambitious one but it came off. No?

448C (The Colour of Love)

God knows what this song is. It’s a nonsense tune, just a list of colours and a strange cast of characters including J Edgar Hoover, Christy Moore, Charon the boatman of the Styx and an ugly baby. We were really throwing it all at the wall here – bossa-nova, Zef-style, pub rock, Disney villain falsettos. Does it work? You be the judge. Stick your opinion in the mail, no stamp. It’s also the only track on the record to utilise autotune, to a highly effective and devastating degree I might add. We’ve got no business writing a drop like the one in this song but who gives a sh-t anyway? My favourite elements of writing this were scrolling through synths for a whole year and playing the triangle for four hours straight. Enjoy with an open mind and light grey underwear.

Crucify!

A fan favourite for years, Crucify. We’ve been edging it for so long I can’t remember what all the various versions sounded like but this is definitely the best one. We’ve been ending the set with it due to its propensity for utter collapse during its death-throes. One of two tracks on the record where certain horn lines actually catch in my throat sometimes. A narcissistic epic about looking for a hill to die on, it’s got sections for days, a reggaeton/dembow hook, stolen Serge Gainsbourg lyrics, a 60s outro. Hellish or miraculous, I don’t know. You realise you will have to take a side with us. Purists need not chime in. It is the marriage of Motomami and Bob Dylan and Hawkwind. If you really think about it. But most importantly it’s us, in all our misguided floridity.

Oh, Irony

The Opus Kink ballad was inevitable I guess. I wrote this one in the midnight kitchen to ease my troubled mind or some other such excuse. It made me feel worse but I can think of no better way to end this record – we call upon the spirits of Otis Redding and Kris Kristofferson for this one, I think ‘Dreams To Remember’ by Otis was the direct inspiration, that song will make me cry and grasp at the air and in the studio so did the instrumental ending of this song. A paean of lack, self-pitying outside-looking-in fare, the hole in the pail, the search for the grail etc. Pleased with the lyrics and the wobbly vocal take – a first take and probably the drunkest take I’ve ever sung, there’s a win in there somewhere. The band are so restrained and classy on this you wouldn’t believe. The crowning glory of making this, though, was watching Jack sit down for 15 minutes with a notebook, write the entire five part harmony then go down into the live room and record each part himself one after the other on four different horns (on top of Jed’s sax line). About 30 minutes from conception to birth, like some Giger-esque abomination of evolution. And with the final shart and cackle of this song we bid you Sweet Goodbye, until the next one…