The cover of The Sweet Goodbye looks like a crime scene, black and white, drowned and miserable. Nothing on the record inside sounds like it’s observing that mood for more than about four seconds at a time.
Opus Kink formed in Brighton the best part of a decade ago, put out three EPs, and then took roughly eight years to actually finish a debut album, mostly because six people with day jobs don’t get studio time handed to them. A 2024 standalone single, ‘I Wanna Live With You’, wasn’t even meant to make it onto the record. Its producer, Dani Bennett-Spring, passed the demos on to Grammy-winning producer Craig Silvey, whose credits run from Arcade Fire to Florence + The Machine, and he liked what he heard enough to take the whole thing on properly.
Frontman Angus Rogers has described the result as an attempt “to corral the dreams, desires, neuroses, fears, musical, religious, sexual and historical obsessions of six people in the loose paddock of a rock and roll record.” That’s a fairly accurate warning label.
Opener ‘Come Over, Do Me Wrong’ sets the tone: an Ethio-jazz horn riff stabbing in from every direction, Rogers delivering total fatalism like it’s the punchline to a joke he’s already heard: Oh happy day, reasons for living, I have accepted the joke as it came. It shouldn’t be as fun as it is.
That trick runs through the whole record. ‘448C (The Colour of Love)’ is named after the Pantone shade widely considered the ugliest colour in the world, and it plays the joke completely straight, a genuinely tender song hiding behind a punchline title. ‘The Head Tree’ brings in Brighton’s The New Eves for harmonies that land somewhere between Earth, Wind & Fire and a Gregorian choir, which sounds like it shouldn’t work and does anyway.
Listened to cold, the record’s brass-heavy jazz-and-punk collision does sound like it belongs to a specific moment, the Windmill Brixton scene circa 2019, more than it belongs to right now. That’s a fair thing to notice, and also a strange one to hold against a band who spent eight years finishing the thing: of course it sounds like where they came from. The songs are sharp enough, and Rogers is funny enough, that the record earns its lateness rather than apologising for it.
By the time it’s over, the joke from the cover has been answered. The record never looked like the photograph on its sleeve. It looked like six people who’d rather laugh their way through the drowning than pose for the picture of it.
