“I find characters to be most interesting when they’re corrupted, somehow,” says Shame frontman Charlie Steen, as he mulls over the themes running through his band’s fourth record. To say he finds such people beguiling is an understatement; on ‘Cutthroat’, he has constructed a lurid, warped world populated by posers, hypocrites and Brazilian bandits, one where infidelity, addiction, cowardice and moral inconsistency are rife. The sound of the record matches the tone – produced by John Congleton, it is the London five-piece’s rawest, noisiest, most incendiary album so far.
Steen insists, though, that ‘Cutthroat’ isn’t powered by anger or resentment; the unflattering, and often bleak, portrait it paints of the human condition is simply the result of trying to make a more outward-looking record in Britain in 2025. “I’m interested in people’s contradictions,” Steen explains. “I was reading a collection of Oscar Wilde’s plays where the theme of paradox came up time and time again, and I was thinking about how that relates to human behaviour. It’s why there’s so many references to cowardice on the album.
“It’s a dirty word, but we’re probably all guilty of it at one time or another, whether we like to admit it or not. It’s fascinating, to me, how we know what the right thing to do is, but we don’t go through with it – ‘I love her, but I can’t tell her.’ That type of thing.”
Roughly half of the songs on ‘Cutthroat’ are character studies; Steen is a piercingly insightful observer. ‘Quiet Life’ is an achingly sad lament of an abusive relationship; ‘Screwdriver’ is a similarly affecting tale of a soul lost in the mire of addiction. Even when he’s in more combative form – skewering the superficial on ‘Plaster’, or decrying the waster at the centre of ‘Nothing Better’ as “shit craic at the pub” – his words are still suffused with empathy. He manages to confront his subjects without ever seeming to judge them.
“I think you can be exposed to somebody’s faults and still empathise with them,” he explains. “Tony Soprano is a great example. You feel for him, even though you shouldn’t, and that’s just through the quality of the writing. So I was thinking about that kind of contradictory character, whether it’s somebody who’s arrogant or somebody who’s bumming around, but ultimately I’m saying to them, ‘Do what you want to do’.”
It helps that ‘Cutthroat’ is laced with Steen’s trademark humour. He possesses a rapier wit made all the more cutting by his deadpan delivery, whether he’s taking aim at protein shake drinkers and “gel-haired estate agents” (‘Cowards’) or excoriating the ruling classes on the album’s closer, the eat-the-rich anthem ‘Axis of Evil’. “That’s something that comes quite naturally,” he says. “There’s been a bit of humour to everything we’ve done, with the possible exception of [2021’s] ‘Drunk Tank Pink’.
“I’m not saying we’re a bunch of really funny dudes, but we’re piss-takers; that’s the way we interact with each other. It’d be inauthentic if we didn’t bring that into the music. There’s humour and stupidity in equal measure, but it’s the stupid shit that we tend to find funniest. Life is ridiculous; we try not to take it too seriously.”
From the outset, the plan for album number four was to produce something faithful to the febrile atmosphere that’s come to define the band’s live shows. It was crucial that the kind of chaotic energy that helped them to burst out of that zeitgeist-defining scene around The Windmill in Brixton would be palpable on the record that became ‘Cutthroat’. Enter John Congleton, who for years now has been one of the most sought-after producers in indie rock for his no-nonsense approach and sparkling track record of cutting to the core of what makes a band tick.
“We’re piss-takers; that’s the way we interact with each other. It’d be inauthentic if we didn’t bring that into the music” – Charlie Steen
“It very much felt as if somebody was firmly in charge,” says guitarist Eddie Green. “It was like he knew, down to the minute, how the day was going to go. And he’s probably developed some pretty strong interpersonal and psychological skills in his line of work over the years, and that was a learning curve for us, but it was a good one. He sat with the demos, and then came in with some very direct ideas about what needed to change.”
You suspect those ideas involved keeping the songs as close to the bone as possible. The heavier side of ‘Cutthroat’ fizzes and crackles with a fraught tension that will be familiar to anybody who’s ever caught Shame live, while the stripped-back production in its quieter moments makes Steen’s investigations into the grimier side of modern life all the more stark. “The lyrics were feeding the mood and energy of these songs more than on previous records,” says Steen. “John picked up on that and helped us simplify them, just by asking, ‘What’s the identity of this song?’ And anything that wasn’t essential to that could be stripped away.”
There was room to explore new sonic territory, too. Both ‘Quiet Life’ and ‘Spartak’ carry something of an Americana lilt to them, albeit one refracted back through the Shame prism, while the brooding electronic textures that drive ‘After Party’ came courtesy of some at-home experimentation by guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith.
“I think we were always at peace with it being quite an eclectic record,” says Green. “We wanted to work in some of the electronic ideas that Sean was bringing in. The writing process is always an open forum for people to bring up ideas; nothing ever gets shot down immediately. By this point, we trust each other – enough that if one of us really believes in something, then we tend to go with it. There’s a lack of boundaries, which is really quite nice.”
Said lack of parameters extended all the way to language. Steen sings in both English and Portuguese on ‘Lampião’, a track that feels like both a musical and lyrical diversion – a hazy electro-folk song about a famous Brazilian bandit, from whom the track takes its name, that further brightens his world of colourful characters.
“It’s nice that we can still surprise each other,” he laughs. “My girlfriend’s Brazilian, and I wrote that one after a trip there, when her family told me about the legend of this guy, who’s like a folk hero in Brazil. Sean and Josh [Finerty, bassist] had been ill, away from the studio for a few days, and when I played ‘Lampião’ for them, they didn’t even realise it was a Shame track. When it clicked, they were like, ‘Where the fuck have you been?’”
Ultimately, Lampião is not the only bandit to appear on ‘Cutthroat’; the record is replete with disreputable characters of one type or another. While it’s rarely overtly political, it’s an album that simmers with a nervous energy that feels appropriate to the UK in 2025.
“That was always going to seep in,” Steen agrees. “I mean, it’s a pretty fucked-up time. The album doesn’t have a direct political mission behind it –It’s more social commentary than anything else – but the type of person I’m asking about is easy to find at the moment. You don’t have to look far for seedy characters, for cowards and hypocrites – in life, or on this record. I wanted to write looking outward rather than inward, and this is what I saw.”
Shame’s ‘Cutthroat’ is out on September 5 via Dead Oceans.