The Bug Club will release “Every Single Muscle,” the Welsh band’s incredible new album on Friday, May 29th, from Sub Pop. The 18-track long player features the first single, “Watching the Omnibus,” along with approximately 17 other tight, anxious, and engaging garage-punk number. “Every Single Muscle” was produced and mixed by Tom Rees at Rat Trap Studios in Cardiff, Wales, and mastered by Mikey Young.
“Every Single Muscle” will be the band’s fifth album, making it a hat-trick for the Welsh duo and their esteemed Seattle-based patrons. Since “Very Human Features,” which emerged in June of 2025, the non-stop tour has seen the BBC 6 Music and KEXP favourites ping-pong across the Atlantic like they used to the Severn Bridge. Various festival slots in the summer kept them from having any sort of holiday – who needs one when you live in Wales anyway? – until it was time to head back to the writing room.
“Watching the Omnibus” is the first reveal of many sub-two-minute tracks on the album, setting the tone for The Bug Club’s punkiest offering yet and recalling both the short, sharp snaps of their very first singles and the grunt of recent releases.
Initially comprising the songwriting core of Sam Willmett (vocals/guitar) and Tilly Harris (vocals/bass) with Dan Matthew (drums), The Bug Club started plying their trade in 2016. They were signed by UK label Bingo Records in Autumn 2020 and first single “We Don’t Need Room for Lovin” was released in February 2021, followed by EP “Launching Moondream” One. It quickly established the band as the tongue-in-cheek and live-focused antidote to the previous year’s penned-in pandemic drudgery. BBC 6 Music’s Marc Riley was an early champion.
During a trip to America they caught the eye of Sub Pop, just in time to get them on board to serve up a beefy slab of garage-punk on “On the Inner Workings of the System,” gaining an appropriately beefed-up stateside following in the process. The partnership proved fruitful, and with Sup Pop firmly in The Bug Club club they got cracking on “Very Human Features.” Is three the magic number? Probably not. But “Every Single Muscle” – number three for The Bug Club and the label – certainly comes close enough to convince your average strange human person that it might be.