Album Review: shame - Cutthroat (Dead Oceans)

There's a moment in every social collapse when those consistently shoved to the margins realize they've got nothing left to lose. That's when they stop knocking politely and start kicking down doors. With that, Cutthroat is the sound of shame crashing a party that was never meant for them, tracking mud on the furniture of the status quo, while refusing to apologize. If you were at their Control show two years ago, then you know what's up. If not, well, they're back on Tuesday, October 28, for another round of confrontational post-punk fury.

Cutthroat is "Ground Zero" music dedicated to the seemingly endless parade of "cunts, cowards and hypocrites" in the music industry (singer Charlie Steen's words, not mine), though he might as well have been describing the entire cultural moment we're all forced to stumble through. Where previous offering Food for Worms hung its heart on sleeves stained with lived-in grief, Cutthroat simply rips the sleeves off and says it's not worth it anyway.

Thematically, the album sketches a crowded menagerie of petty tyrannies and everyday appetites. There’s a through-line of social, political, and romantic cowardice with shame resisting sermonising. Instead, they dramatize the parasite by embodying it in kinetic forms. The moral vision here is not clean, and that’s the point. The world stinks, and we're all responsible. It’s closer to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s theatre of cruelty than any punk puritanism, where no one gets the dignity of being purely good or purely damned.

Every track gets stripped of fat, gristle, and unnecessary sentiment. The murky atmosphere of past work is gone, as are the brooding interludes where silence pretends to be profound. It's Oscar Wilde territory, except shame have weaponized the paradox. The deeper you dig into Cutthroat, the more it reveals itself as a sustained middle finger to the whole concept of earned belonging.

The album's eponymous opening track lands like boxing a kangaroo, and it might be the most honest thing shame have ever recorded. Steen's voice sounds filtered through a cement mixer full of broken glass, snarling "Big, beautiful, naked women fall out the sky / Motherfucker, I was born to die". This is what John Congleton's (St Vincent, Angel Olsen) no-bullshit production philosophy bought them, ageing out of their own mythology and treating it like a hangover. Then, "Cowards Around" could soundtrack a block party during civil war. It's menacing and almost danceable with verses like "Cowards are politicians criminals / Cowards are gel-haired real estate agents / Cowards are people who got a degree / Cowards are people who like people like me."

"Quiet Life" swaggers like a cowboy on the wrong continent (“Round here nothing’s good for me / But I still can’t make the choice to leave … ’Cause I’m a coward, don’t you know.”) The humor exists (as it always does with shame), but blink and you've missed the joke and caught the punchline in your ribs. Different shades of the same unforgiving light paint tracks like "Spartak," which even approaches ballad territory. The guitars actually open up. Steen's vocal lands closer to human. You can hear him recalling how to feel, but then he decides it's too much effort for those who were never supposed to matter anyway.

Then there's "Lampião," probably the clearest expression of shame's gate-crashing philosophy. It swaggers with Portuguese verses over a samba-flirting backbeat. They shouldn't work, but they do. It's one of the few moments where the record glances outward.

"Screwdriver" grabs the wheel and yanks hard left. This punk bears no resemblance to your grandfather's, as it isn't rebelling against anything specific but still something omnipresent ("A hole in every pocket of your tattered suit / When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose"). Rebellion implies you were part of the system to begin with.

The album ends in a synthetic smear with "Axis of Evil." They ditch guitars entirely and go full digital nightmare. Steen lets his voice dissolve into the circuitry. It becomes seductive performance art about one's own absence, while short-circuiting under the lights.

What makes Cutthroat feel new in shame’s catalogue isn’t only the rockabilly tints, Americana sidelight, electro-goth closing time, but also the refusal to treat eclecticism as collage. Cutthroat isn't about finding balance. It's about finding the edge and learning to live there comfortably, even though comfort was never part of the deal... And this one has plenty of edges. Sharp enough to cut yourself on accident, tempting enough that you want to test them on purpose. Perfect music for people who've realized that when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose and everything to take.