With the release of their new EP, ONLY HUMANS, Skeleton Club present themselves as a band teetering on the edge—the fine line between creativity and sanity—as they navigate a strenuous new world of self-isolation. Let’s be honest though, this has always been what we’ve loved about Skeleton Club. Their debut 2019 release, Death, Love, & Money, was already brilliantly indulging heavily in weird vibes. It’s just convenient that everyone has been forced onto their wavelength.
As the band notes, ONLY HUMANS was written and recorded in bedrooms, as has become de rigeur. The necessities of social isolation demanding a new level of introspection from an industry that naturally thrives on extroversion have yielded exactly the results you’d expect. With the band sharing writing duties across members, the results narrowly sway between sentiments of “I’m just a twenty-something nimrod” to songs that are “for broke people who are down on their luck but keep dreaming big.” You can fit a lot under the umbrella, but there’s a running theme that emphasizes how society is one bad day away from a chaotic breakdown. To be fair, that’s a big mood for most of us right now.
Over the course of six tracks, however, the EP gets a little more diverse, tossing nods left and right to some unexpected sources. “777,” the EP’s opening track on aiming for the jackpot with little more than dumb luck, is like MGMT’s “Kids” on steroids — or more accurately, Morgan Zwicker’s massive drumming.
The band quickly shift down into a more laidback gear for “My Dear Friend,” with a personal story inspired by a friend of Skeleton Club’s frontman Andrew Matthews, and the travails they endured at the inception of the pandemic. The story quite literally samples an iconic episode of National Film Board of Canada’s Hinterland Who’s Who before building into a frenzy you’d expect from Trent Reznor. After a brief interlude for “Brad Pitt,” the band’s carefree and upbeat single about the brief but eventful life of a $200 truck, they’re back at it with “Magic Beach,” a song inspired by social isolation with big NIN vibes.
“Wormz” might be the odd song out; the “Octopus’s Garden” of ONLY HUMANS. It veers heavily into the weird, not just as a tribute to Matthews’ inordinate obsession with fishing, (“I wrote this song about the fishing-hook worms and how they are going to make an army and come for revenge on society,” says Matthews) but also sounds like a nod to David Seville’s 1958 hit, “Witch Doctor.”
Closing out the album with another social isolation-inspired track, “In The Sun” is a single-minded groove that sounds like Fatboy Slim was forgotten inside of a cave for a year. “My mind’s been playing tricks on me. Gotta get back in the sun,” repeats Matthews throughout the song, pausing only to reset when the simulation glitches.
As usual, Skeleton Club are brilliant, subtly nesting humour inside of massive songs. ONLY HUMANS might be supremely weird—and justifiably so, given the context—but they never lose sight of the bigger picture: that the groove is almighty.