Beneath an Exeter car park lies ground that once bore a gallows. At the heart of their debut album, The Sweet Goodbye, Opus Kink spin a song for the woman interred there, arriving nine years after the sextet began playing together in Brighton and cut their teeth on the Brixton Windmill circuit alongside the likes of Squid, Shame, Warmduscher and Deadletter.
The band properly appeared in 2019 with a single cut at Toe Rag, then made two EPs for Nice Swan. 'Til the Stream Runs Dry roamed across neo-western dust. It also won them a following, though people talked more about the energetic live show. My Eyes, Brother! blurred further into its own shadows, costing the band some of its early affections.
The Sweet Goodbye rises to meet that criticism. Producer Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine, R.E.M.) pits vintage drum machines against live musicianship, prominently thrusting horns into a zoot suit era backing. "Come Over, Do Me Wrong" walks in on its bassline before horn stabs take its second half into a controlled chaos, as if The Tiger Lilies were traveling down the Black Country, New Road toward the sea.
Across the album, this cast of colorful characters reach for scripture when the moment outweighs everything else. In an infant’s voice, the man in "I'm a Pretty Showboy" asks, “Have you got my milk for me? / And a teaspoon of honey?” over a track that keeps rising toward a jam, but “if you want a full belly better get on your knees”. He signs off by quoting Ecclesiastes: “All is vanity.” The verse survives him.
"Will It Come For You?" lays flowers in a penal colony, Kafka-esquely carving its laws into the flesh. Angus Rogers delivers most of it in a near-spoken baritone, while the backing voices crowd in behind him in a growl. The title track makes an American Gothic incantation of its chorus, the largely instrumental "Peckham Nocturne" sits in the register of Michael Kiwanuka's “Love & Hate” with a Los Lobos seasoning, and "I Have To Shine My Sunday Shoes" opens on a Screamin' Jay Hawkins holler before falling into post-punk call and response.
"The Head Tree" names Alice Molland, condemned for witchcraft at Exeter in 1685, and sets women hanged at Heavitree beside her. “My name is Alice Molland, and they hung me in the morn,” The New Eves sing with them, their harmony pitched high and old in the folk manner. The album’s standout track, it carries an exalted sea shanty vibe. Its second half borrows from an old Welsh poem whose speaker lists every shape he has worn, a sword among them. So a woman on trial for changing shape performs a catalog of her changes; the court gets exactly what it came for.
"Crucify!" sentences the case over surf-rock guitar. The narrator goes looking for a hill to die on and finds Golgotha standing at the ready. He commissions his own execution and defiantly calls for the hammer and nails, “I felt just like the brave man of Tiananmen Square / Or like that old Tom Joad / Hefting the world of pain on my shoulders / Tell 'em boys (Crucify me now!).” The crowd he addresses waits in fine rain. At six minutes, the song has room to drop into a slow choral country passage before the horns take over.
That tree stands in the Welsh poem and again above Exeter, and by the last song a man is asking to be nailed to it, having run out of anything else he knows how to say, with five others guiding him through the request. Knees turn up everywhere on this album. A man goes down on them for a teaspoon of honey, another for a hill he picked out himself. "Oh, Irony" sends him off with a big room song built on a simple synth line, its narrator down on the floor and listening at the door, ravenous and lonesome, cut off mid-sentence.
Opus Kink play as part of Control Club’s 18th anniversary on Saturday, October 3, 2026.
