TV Face return with Wolf Rents Bark, the follow-up to their acclaimed debut Tide of Men. It’s a record that snarls harder, bites deeper, and stares straight into the darkness of our species’ worst instincts. Where their first album was self-produced in a Carnforth church and bungalow, this time the trio decamped to Whitewood Studios in Liverpool to work with producer Rob Whiteley. The result is a live, Albini-esque sound: raw, muscular and unvarnished, capturing TV Face exactly as they are; sharp, furious and unflinchingly loud. Thematically, Wolf Rents Bark revolves around humanity’s appetite for self-destruction; a species intent on consuming everything in its path, including itself. Across nine tracks, the band explore acquiescence to power, the rise of extremism, war-for-profit, and the numbing toxicity of modern media. It’s heavy, satirical and unsettling, but it never loses its sense of playfulness, surreal humour and biting wit.

The album opens with Get What We’re Given, a bleak portrait of resignation. Bowed heads, empty hands, closed eyes: survival is reduced to swallowing whatever crumbs of power are tossed down. Yet, in its repetition, the song finds a kind of resistance, a refusal to let silence be the last word. Boots Pocket Coffin, released in May as a limited red vinyl single (which sold out in under two hours), is one of the record’s fiercest moments. A venomous attack on the super-rich and their insatiable appetites, it’s biting, cynical and relentless. Wealth here is a hunger that devours everything: “fill your boots, fill your pocket, fill your coffin.”

Millipede follows, a warped carnival of grotesques where sideshows, mirror mazes and clowns mock a polarised, fractured culture. Beneath the sneer is something darker: truth gnawed away until all that remains is absurd theatre. Hug Like A Critic turns inward, a claustrophobic study of normalised self-destruction. Pain becomes both armour and performance; intimacy turns to judgement. “You wear your skin like a restraint / Like a jacket put on backwards” is one of the album’s most chilling lines, a bleak reminder of how suffering becomes routine.

Scottish Kisses is perhaps the most outwardly political track: a blistering, chaotic portrait of Britain drifting towards the far right. With surreal, violent imagery, “Forcefed an apparition / Amok and burning books”, the song frames complacency and consumption as fertile ground for extremism. The sneering chant of “Plimsolls and pasties / Shoezone and Greggs” nails the caricature of everyday Britain twisted into complicity. The second single, White Noise White Lies (released August on limited white vinyl), shifts focus to big streaming and the emptiness of online culture. “Caught in its headlamps… a big fan of tinnitus” skewers the numbing saturation of noise, while “every word hits like a fifty-foot jargonaut” ridicules the bombast of curated personas. The repeated “why shut your head” is a frustrated plea against passivity in a world paralysed by spectacle.

Happy New Year is stark and poetic, capturing the erosion of innocence in jagged fragments: “Wake scrape floor / Learn world fast / Wolf rents bark.” Childhood fractures under the grind of survival, its refrain, “It’s such a challenge to stay alive / When your patience is eroded”, among the album’s most devastating moments. The disorienting I Am Horse plunges listeners into the instability of a post-truth world. Its paradoxes, “I am debt as plenty / I am snake as ladder / I am wet as desert”, mirror the collapse of logic, while the refrain “Fallen up another downslide / To prove the lie” nails the endless churn of misinformation. Finally, Ways to Pass the Time closes the album with its heaviest blow: a harrowing indictment of genocide and war-for-profit. “Fall across a red sky / You can meet the murder maker” lays atrocity bare, while the lullaby refrain of “Peaceful, peaceful baby / Out of time” becomes a chilling lament. It ends the record not with resolution, but with confrontation, unflinching, raw and impossible to ignore. As ever, the band’s artwork (created by sTeVe) extends the music’s vision into a striking visual world.

The mirrored, playing-card style cover shows wolves in suits, each pickpocketing the other while begging in turn — a brutal satire on shareholder capitalism and the corporate cosplay of “men of the people”. Inside, a wolf reads Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four not as a warning, but as a manual. It’s a perfect companion to the album’s themes: absurd, satirical, and deeply unsettling. With Wolf Rents Bark, TV Face delivers what Hella Fuzz once called their “sonic fury with a satirical edge” at its most refined. It’s darker, harder and funnier than its predecessor, pulling influence from Pinocchio, Goya‘s Saturn Devouring His Son, the Ouroboros, and soundtracks as diverse as Killing Eve, Yellowjackets, and Mika Levi‘s Under the Skin. A record of cultural collapse and species-wide self-sabotage, it’s not just noise for the end times, it’s satire you can dance to.

Wolf Rents Bark will be released on September 5th via Crackedankles Records

Live photography courtesy of Gary Hough from Shot From Both Sides

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