The Nightingales – The Awful Truth (Fire) 13th Floor Album Review
The Nightingales have never been ones for nostalgia, but they’ve earned theirs. Formed in the embers of The Prefects, they emerged as part of the original UK punk explosion, appearing on the legendary White Riot tour in the late ’70s alongside The Slits, The Clash, and Subway Sect.
Unlike some of their peers, they didn’t fade into comfortable reunion tours or half-hearted retrospectives. Instead, led by the unflagging Robert Lloyd, they reformed in the mid-2000s and have since produced a blistering run of records, steadily gaining new converts.
The 2020 documentary King Rocker — fronted by Stewart Lee — shed surreal, slyly affectionate light on Lloyd’s life and career. More anti-biopic than rock doc, the film weaves together half-remembered myths, contradictory anecdotes, and an ongoing hunt for a long-lost statue of King Kong in 1970s Birmingham. In doing so, it paints Lloyd not as a conventional cult hero, but as a quietly absurdist presence in British music — part folk memory, part chaos agent, who sits in your local pub, taking notes of what’s happening around him, and sometimes sings.
Their latest release, The Awful Truth, is described by Lloyd as “a stream of consciousness… savagely edited to fit the music,” and it is a furious, funny, and frequently thrilling response to the madness of the modern age. From the opening blast of The New Emperor’s New Clothes, you are in familiar yet unsettling terrain. Fast-strummed guitars collide with pounding drums and a pulsing piano, while Lloyd tears into populism, vanity, and mediocrity: “Out of the nothingness from which it emerged / With no principles – just existing on favours.”
If that sets the tone, Same Old Riff keeps the pressure up. Driven by insistent drums and guitars that veer between jagged and euphoric, it delivers one of Lloyd’s most potent refrains: “The powerless are the problem, as if, as if.” The song title may be wry nod to the music, but it is also a savage takedown of political blame games and culture war repetition. Meanwhile, The Men, Again shifts from Beefheart-like chaos into something almost danceable — cymbals crash, guitars lurch forward, and Lloyd spits fire: “Their future is wasted by selfish men, blind with blight / God given, this hatred abounds, Amen.”
But this isn’t all snarl and spit. Just Before and Giddy Aunt slow things down with more introspective textures. The former offers a moment of echoing clarity, with rattling drums and a building intensity that eventually settles. The latter, more ambiguous in tone, blends quietly sad vocals with a gently tumbling arrangement and then the The Princess and the Piss Artist goes even further into hushed storytelling — part nursery rhyme, part eulogy — and it is Lloyd at his most theatrical.
There are playful moments too. Warm Up begins with a radio transmission before bursting into a music hall riot, while The Best Revenge opens with spaghetti western restraint before exploding into a feedback-heavy outro. Throughout, the band is in tight, inventive form — Fliss Kitson’s drumming is a particular standout, guiding the chaos with precision and flair. And yes, there’s a Randy Kuntz on tuba and tambourine — surely a pseudonym.
A visceral and lo-fi affair, the album pulses with high-energy guitar, bass and drums — part Krautrock repetition, part first-wave punk, with a hint of music hall mischief and pub sing-along beneath the racket. The Awful Truth is a ferociously literate and musically restless record that fans of The Fall, Luke Haines, or Half Man Half Biscuit will find much to enjoy. But this isn’t music to admire from afar — it’s music to be rattled by, grinned at, and replayed immediately.
If this is the awful truth, long may it ring out.
John Bradbury
Album released Friday, April 4th
Available On Limited Edition Red Vinyl & CD
