Humour push the listener into a maze, hands them a torch, and makes them find their way out. Learning Greek is their debut album, a full-length narratively-driven escalation built on the band’s earlier short-form pressure tests, 2022’s Pure Misery and 2023’s A Small Crowd Gathered To Watch Me. They formed in Glasgow during the lockdown years, and you can hear the DIY provenance in the way Rod Jones' production avoids studio sheen.
"Neighbours" opens, sketching a man alone in his flat, convinced that mischievous creatures share the space. They perform small acts of sabotage aimed directly at his nerves. The lyrics are clinical about domestic coercion, "when I’m cold, they turn off the heating." Under that, the guitar backing flashes a Rob Zombie "Dragula" silhouette, hot-rodded and a little cartoonish.
"Memorial" shifts into a different register with vocalist Andreas Christoloudis delivering the vocals with pop-punk velocity. It's built for shout-along catharsis, but the story underneath is anything but. The song lives inside the Iliad, in the moment Andromache says goodbye to Hector the night before he dies. Then a spoken passage comes in, changing the texture of the whole thing. The song seems to stop and catch its breath, letting language carry what melody couldn't reach. When the line hits, “what more is there to say than I’ve already said,” when you already know the outcome?
"Plagiarist" brings the album back into contemporary panic, as the character is a lyricist under pressure to dress the band’s music with words and discovers that the well has dried up. Even theft fails him. He reaches for favorite books and realizes he's already used up the lines worth stealing. When he admits he "Wrote down their lyrics and passed them off as mine", it lands with the flatness of someone reading a statement aloud in a courtroom where nobody is surprised.
The middle stretch proves the band knows how to write a pop song. They're just not interested in keeping it pretty. "Dirty Bread" and "Die Rich" have real choruses that land and stick. But threaded through are rhythmic micro-hiccups that curdle at exactly the wrong moment. None of this feels like chaos for chaos's sake, though. If anything, there's a DC hardcore aftertaste to it all, rage squeezed down into a single blunt phrase.
"I Only Have Eyes" features guest vocals from Theo Bleak. The feature feels like a change in the camera lens. The added voice brings a different grain of intimacy and lets a softer unease surface while the edge stays intact. Humour still move with tension.
"In the Paddies" has the narrator standing in a muddy field, summoning the dead across history. The song moves like an extended oner that refuses to cut. When the narrator’s father reads lines that return to Hector’s death, Learning Greek admits its deepest interest: death as a language ritual.
"It Happened In The Sun" closes the album. Its line, "Some boys cracked me open with a pipe, and nobody cried", lands with brutal inevitability. A vocoded vocal treatment flickers through. The mix keeps enough air around the instruments that the sunlight feels real, exposing everything.
Learning Greek often feels like Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth. Domesticity becomes a space for experimentation. Words are tools that misname reality on purpose. Humour keep things weird and tactile, while also preventing it from descending into quirk.
Humour have built a world where hooks are bait and narrative is pressure in the same breadth as other guitar-forward Brits like Squid, shame, and Black Country, New Road. For proof, keep an eye on Control Club on March 17, 2026, when the temperamental Glaswegians bring their restless, guitar-forward rock to Bucharest.
