Meet Ugly, the Cambridge band who are always shapeshifting

It took nearly a decade for Cambridge’s Ugly to release their debut EP. 2024’s Twice Around the Sun actually arrived after more than seven trips around the glowing orb for a band who have slowly and subtly changed shape and form multiple times over.

Forming as a post-punk band in the late 2010s, it was lockdown that allowed the band to assess their sound and their mission. Line-up changes and an evolution of their sound followed, with Twice Around the Sun reintroducing a band inspired by the spiritual, chamber pop, traditional folk and more.

“We all sat down and said, ‘Right, how do we want to continue?’” vocalist Samuel Goater remembers of the time. “We decided what worked was everyone’s voice coming together – we had something that was exciting.”

Following recent single ‘Next to Die’, the band have now shared the exuberant ‘Gallowine’ and announced details of their debut album, The South Façade, due out in 2026.

Read our interview with Ugly and listen to ‘Gallowine’ via our Play Next playlist on Spotify below.

Your new song ‘Gallowine’ is the first taster of your debut album – can you tell us how it came about?

Theo Guttenplan: As with most of our songs, it started from a bassline and grew from there. But it’s always quite hard to pinpoint what the first idea was. They come out of very small ideas and then everything else gets built around those things. It’s one of our slightly proggier tracks. We’ve been playing it live a lot this summer, and we’ve really enjoyed how it feels play live – it feels like it’s got a runaway train energy to it, and that’s part of what we what we were drawn to for the idea of releasing it as the first single. It’s quite musically dense, and it’s this thing we’ve been going for – tracks that feel kind of proggy, but at a pop song length.

Tom Lane: There are still hallmarks of pop in there – there are choruses and hooks and concision doesn’t really feel like the word, because there’s so much going on.

Jasmine Miller-Sauchella: People say ‘all killer, no filler’ – but like we just put it all in. People might listen to it and be like, ‘You guys are actually like crazy. You’re batshit’, but I don’t know. All these decisions that we made are very deliberate. We think about every single thing; it’s not just chucked in.

I’ve never heard the word gallowine before – is it a place name? What does it mean?

Tom: It’s just a random word!

Oh, I feel a bit better now!

Tom: Someone the other day said that they’d found the meaning of the word – and I’m sure they’re right – but we just went with a phonetic solution. It’s almost an easier way to get songs going. It’s not necessarily anything, but for us, it was something. It was sing-able. We like the way that the vowel sounds sounded in the context of the melody. Plenty of this song is very heavy on nonsense phonetic stuff. But there’s a logic. Harry [Shapiro, bassist] is the king of phonetic logic or free association. You’ll have some kind of word or sound, and he’ll instantly go to the next one. We all try to do a bit of that. It’s hard to describe, really.

Theo: We don’t know it to have any kind of set meaning, but it’s a word that is quite open. I think that’s one of the nice things about these kinds of nonsense words. It lets the listener come to it ascribe their own meaning to it. We’re not telling you what the song is called – we’re giving you a word, and you can make that be whatever you want.

Is this communal type of songwriting important to you, and how has it changed the band?

Sam: Someone has [an idea], and then it very quickly spirals into a thing where it’s all shared –  we all slot in.

Theo: That’s the core of what the sound of the album is. In some ways it’s the sound of that – of songs that have really been carved out from nothing together and then refined from there, as opposed to having some semi-finished object that we then work on together.

When the band came back together, is this something you wanted to be put at the core of your creations together, Sam?

Sam: It’s always changing, I suppose. I wouldn’t say it was necessarily me, or my sort of perception of what the band should be. We all sat down and said, ‘Right, how do we want to continue?’ We decided what worked was everyone’s voice coming together – we had something that was exciting.”

Why did now feel like the time to put out an album, after such a long time playing together?

We’ve had times before where we’ve been working on the demos for an album. During lockdown, it sort of got scrapped. That was almost an album’s worth, but then some of those songs went on to shape the EP. It’s been a real journey together. I don’t think that releasing those songs at that time would have been doing the band justice.

We all feel like music that we have the capability of making now is worthy of a debut album. It’s not like we haven’t been working towards something, but we felt like the EP could have been labelled as an album, but we didn’t think that the songs were enough of like a cohesive project to call it an album. We wanted to make sure that it was a real body of work and that the songs lived in the same world.

With all the shapeshifting of the band across its lifetime, do you see this version of Ugly that you want to stay largely similar in the future – or do you always want to be evolving?

Theo: This is the current form [of the band], but I wouldn’t ever call it a final form. There’s every chance that the process will change again. This album is a landing point along the way. This is a place that we’re in that we all feel good about, and we all feel good enough about  to put out a body of work into the world from this place. It’s almost impossible to say when we go into whatever comes next. We’ll probably start from here, but if that doesn’t work, or we don’t feel that what we’re coming out with is suitable for something to follow this up, then it probably will change again. We don’t really try to foresee that stuff – in a way, you almost can’t. It’s whatever happens, happens.