Nothing But Thieves

Welcome to the Dead Club City. A place, a mindset, a metaverse with cocktails, where privilege and alienation go toe-to-toe. A ballpit and a battleground for celebrity culture, social alienation, personal relationships, the EU, internet subset culture, class, the music industry, political movements and culture wars, tribalism and unity, protest and media, the youth versus the old guard. A club for rocking and rucking.

‘Welcome to the DCC’: the hip-swinging, fist-punching, sky-scraping first song on the fourth album from Nothing But Thieves. An advertisement for the songs and ideas to come, it’s the perfect curtain-raiser. Think: hard rock Daft Punk. Then think: I better get my dancing boots on.

Welcome to Dead Club City: a concept album bursting with characters, concepts, narratives and a walk-on part for a band called Zzzeros who, say their creators, “are desperate to find fame and status in the sleaze of the DCC but end up chewed up and spat out by the city”. Recorded and self-produced by Nothing But Thieves guitarist Dom Craik over six months in a recording studio bunker in the Essex countryside, the 11 songs are vividly alive with big ideas, pop hooks, soul flourishes, hip hop beats, crunchy riffs, Conor Mason’s remarkable and slinky falsetto, and absolutely no prog-rock mentalism* of the kind normally associated with concept albums. *OK there is a bit of that. But it’s fcking banging.

Welcome to the second age of Nothing But Thieves. Ten years young and a decade into their career, the Southend five-piece have never sounded as vital, inspired and blisteringly adventurous as they do on Dead Club City.

The horizon-wide ambition of Dead Club City began when none of us could see further than the end of our noses.

“We had all the songs for Moral Panic banked – and then the pandemic hit,” begins vocalist Conor Mason as he reflects on the circumstances surrounding the lead up to Nothing But Thieves’ last album. The band waited… and waited… and finally released their third record in October 2020 – right before UK’s second national lockdown was imposed. “Then we waited even longer before we could play any of them live.”

“We struggled with that period,” admits guitarist Joe Langridge-Brown. Even though the record was a Number Three hit, with lead single ‘Is Everybody Going Crazy?’ a global streaming smash that’s currently sitting on almost 50 million Spotify plays, “it’s really hard to release an album and not play any shows around it. Especially as our USP as a band is the live element.”

With nowhere else to put their creative energies, the band – Mason, Langridge-Brown, Craik, Philip Blake (bass), James Price (drums) – kept writing. The EP Moral Panic II was the first result. It was released in summer 2021, a couple of months before NBT could, at last, serve themselves and their fans and tour, their dates including a sell-out at London’s O2 Arena and Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome, and totalling over 110,000 ticket sales across the entire run.

That ceaseless creativity, says Langridge-Brown, “kind of faded into writing this album. We were pulling songs apart: ‘That doesn’t work for this EP, that feels new…’ But there was one song, ‘Tomorrow Is Closed’, which came very, very early – we started writing that in 2019.”

A muscular rock anthem with a soaring vocal, that song appears early on Dead Club City, with a key line: “Dirty English sky is washing me away.” That, explains Langridge-Brown, “gives a backdrop to the whole idea of the album – that desperation of wanting to find somewhere new, which you feel especially with the way Conor’s performing the lyric.”

“But in terms of the starting point of the sound,” chips in Craik who, for the first time, has taken charge of the production heavy-lifting on Dead Club City, “one of the first songs we started writing was ‘City Haunts’.”

‘City Haunts’, arguably, sounds like anything but Nothing But Thieves, its DNA encompassing everything from Al Green to Electric 6, The Bee Gees to Blur’s ‘Beetlebum’. Like Paisley Park relocated to Southend-on-Sea, it’s the lipsmacking sound of a beefed-up Prince letting rip with a sinuously sassy falsetto. Mason has never sounded so fly, Nothing But Thieves rarely so loose.

“We landed on something that was a little bit more playful, more glam,” nods Craik with a grin. “That song takes itself less seriously than a lot of our other music does. We added textures and sounds that we wouldn’t normally feel comfortable using.”

As he describes it, “‘Is that cool?’ would often be something we’d normally say when we’re writing music. But this time we left that at the door and were drawing on influences that we would normally deem as guilty pleasures. But the guilt had subsided and it was just a case of: this is fun.”

Set free, Nothing But Thieves’ imagination soared – and a concept developed.

“Dead Club City is a city-sized members’-only club,” explains Langridge-Brown, who takes the lead on lyric writing. “We’ve left it purposefully vague as to what this actually is. Is it a mindset? An actual place? Another planet? Heaven? It’s all these things and none of them.

“But the scale of it is important,” he continues, “because there are all these different stories that happen within this place. How do these characters relate to each other? How do people within the club relate to people outside the club, or vice versa? Will people go to the club, it’s not what they thought it was and maybe want to leave? What is it about their desperation to find something new in this new place? The desperation to get to a higher echelon of class?

“So it’s about all these stories within this city happening at the same time, and how these characters interact.”

These stories and connections will be revealed across 2023, as songs, visuals and exclusive fan opportunities to join the Dead Club City are rolled out over the coming months. Listen out for spacey trip hop ballad ‘Keeping You Around’, where Mason shoots for a “Mac Miller-esque, really reserved, R&B vocal”. Does he stick the landing? What do you think?

And stay tuned for the adventures of Zzzeros, whose ambitions are explored in the shiny Eighties pop-soul gem ‘Do You Love Me Yet?’, but whose dreams may have died by the time we get to the languorous R&B groove of ‘Talking To Myself’.

As well as their collective imagination and ambition, Nothing But Thieves also had the luxury of time and space to imagineer all this.

They set up shop at Kyoto Studios, in the idyllic countryside near Chelmsford, where they proceeded to break down and rebuild their entire studio from scratch, renaming it Dead Club City Studios. For much of 2022, this space offered the seclusion and schedule to play, in every sense. Unlike previous recording trips to LA, this time there was no clock to watch nor budget to micro-manage.

Nor was there a producer heading for their next session. Craik took on the lion’s share of production, aided by John Gilmore as co-producer and engineer, with regular band collaborator Mike Crossey mixing.

“Doing it ourselves, there was way, way less pressure,” says Craik. “It meant we could question everything. That’s why I personally feel like it’s our strongest record in terms of there’s no stone left unturned, we’ve questioned everything, and finessed it further than anything than we’ve ever done before.”

Case in point: ‘Pop The Balloon’. That’s the epic prog-rock one, a multi-part, pan-genre symphony.

“It’s probably one of the most complex songs we’ve written,” begins Craik with a laugh. “There’s a hip hop drumbeat. But the guitars and the drums are like Nine Inch Nails meets Queens of the Stone Age. Then the middle eight goes on some sort of synth-prog odyssey.

“Then the chorus catches you off-guard every because it’s so bizarre – it’s got so many polyrhythms and layers, things that are meant to throw you off. So when you’re headbanging, it’s almost like someone rips the rug from underneath your feet. It’s always twisting and turning. And it makes you smile because it’s almost comedy how we had the audacity or stupidity to weave in a two-minute-long synth odyssey.”

As album closers go, ‘Pop The Balloon’ is a monster, a way to exit Dead Club City with more than vibes rattling round your brain.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, nor daunted by the idea of a concept album – an idea that, the band freely acknowledge, has something of a vexed history.

“We explicitly said: there’s a real taboo with bands doing a concept album, especially later on in their career,” remembers Craik. “And we didn’t want to fall into the category of bands where you go so deep into the concept you can’t enjoy the songs individually. So as much as this concept’s great and it has given the album a three-dimensional state, you can listen to the songs individually and not have any backstory to the concept. You can still enjoy them in their own right.”

Before we fully enter, then, the heavy doors of Dead Club City, there will be another appetiser in the shape of second single ‘Overcome’. It’s Don Henley’s ‘Boys of Summer’ relocated from California to the Essex coast. It’s that pop, that uniquely NBT, that brilliant.

Mason grins at the thought of their band’s unabashed, pedal-to-the-metal, road-trip anthem.

“A friend of ours in another band said the great thing about our band is that we’re not scared of a chorus or a melody. But I don’t think we’ve ever really thought about it. It always comes down to what you’re listening to. We all have such crazy expansive musical tastes,” adds a rock band frontman here reborn as a great British soul vocalist.

“And one of the things that unites us is pop, for sure. But that’s just strong songwriting. And Nirvana were pop. Tom Petty is pop. It’s just good chorus writing, good melody writing. We’ve never been afraid of that.”

A decade into their existence, Nothing But Thieves have made a record that’s the sum of all their ideas and experiences, their influences and ambitions.

As Langridge-Brown puts it, “I think this is probably the first time that we haven’t sounded like just five people in a band. It feels like we’ve transcended that. It doesn’t just feel like a band album. It’s opened the door, and that’s the really exciting thing about this record. It feels over and beyond that.”

“There’s a risk in doing a record like this,” acknowledges Craik. “Concepts can go wrong, or just be weak. And also, recording it ourselves can go terribly!” he laughs. “So we had to step up and deliver because we didn’t have a producer. We all had to be switched on and questioning it all. And it just feels like it embodies everything about the band right now.”

And, finally… it’s going to be a blast to tour, right?

“Oh, yeah!” beams Mason. “It’ll feel like a party. This record has a little bit of disco, a lot of soul, and a lot of upbeat moments that are light on their feet. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.”

Welcome to Dead Club City. Membership is free but the perks are infinite. And don’t worry: your name is down and you are coming in.