A saxophone and trumpet rise like possessed mosquitos as a jittery beat bombs it down an imaginary highway. Into this mariachi-disco a man starts intoning lyrics – half preacher, half ribald speed date. “Nail up a stranger, I will be your saviour,” he sings. The song is ‘Crucify’, which appears near the end of Opus Kink’s arresting debut, The Sweet Goodbye. “It’s about being a performer,” says frontman Angus Rogers, “and the ridiculousness and silliness of wanting to put yourself up on stage.” The biblical imagery of the figure who carries the sins of his followers (and the dead rock stars who have been made in his image) is something Rogers is both experiencing and commenting on, as the singer and guitarist of one of the most hotly tipped bands in recent memory. With his shaven head, long neck and silver earrings, Rogers himself looks shamanic, and speaking to him it’s clear that he is bursting with deep pockets of intellect and romanticism. He is a calligraphic drawing of an artistic force squeezed into the paper bag of a rock frontman, like a clean Pete Doherty or a less dandyish Brett Anderson, switching between language that is florid and then cutting immediately to the chase. There’s also something perfect about the fact that this interview is being conducted at 11am on a Monday morning in an anonymous hotel lobby: an extremely Opus Kink-esque situation in its mix of the elevated and the prosaic.
On The Sweet Goodbye, the sextet paradoxically seize at the throat of the modern world while subtly decrying modernity itself. It summons up the horror, glamour, and beauty of Britain like a saucy seaside postcard written in blood. On ‘Come Over, Do Me Wrong’ he’s a glazed over fuckboi (“Dead face, cold glove, come over do me wrong”), on ‘I’m a Pretty Showboy’ he’s Narcissus trapped on a reality show (“Every breath is wasted/ All is vanity/ But I’m a pretty showboy/ I don’t want to be free”), while the title track suggests the last rites of a power-drunk dictator. There’s a streak of wild theatricality about Rogers too – a wick of unpredictability which can be lit to capture the wild man spirit of Oliver Reed. “The characters are a heavy mix of me and facets of my personality,” he says, “but it’s blown up and enlarged. It changes every night too with every performance.”
Musically, they are harder to pin down: genres seem insufficient at describing songs, like the aforementioned title track that goes from an inebriated, Jonathan Fire*Eater-esque grind to a nursery rhyme cakewalk featuring a devilish choir of zombies. Is it “baroque pop,” is it “jazz-metal”? So much so that the band have invented their own genres: “witch disco” and “chainsaw pop,” which actually make complete sense once you hear the album. At the same time it speaks to a defiance at being boxed in. That extends to responses to my questions like, “How did you meet?”
“We met loom-caning,” Rogers says, with deadpan sincerity.
Despite The Sweet Goodbye being their debut, the Brighton-based band began almost a decade ago in 2017 and started releasing material in 2020. Rogers describes the group, which also features brothers Sam (bass) and Finn Abbo (drums), Jazz Pope (keyboards), Jed Morgans (saxophone), and Jack Courtney (Trumpet), as brotherly. “It’s like six people’s lives ebbing and flowing in with what we’re doing. We have our disagreements but we appear to not have it in us to let it boil over into physical action. If you’ve been together for eight, nine years and it’s never fallen apart, it’s unlikely to. “What’s it like trying to balance six creative voices together? “You have to overcome quite a lot of frustrations and kill a lot of darlings,” he says. “But I would rather do that and have an end result of something I couldn’t have envisaged.”
The band are currently on a whistle-stop tour of record shops to mark The Sweet Goodbye‘s release, but that hasn’t stopped their creative juices flowing. “We’ve got 20 new songs,” says Rogers. “We’ve stripped things back, we’re using strange drum machines, the sound’s become a lot more skeletal. I don’t have the guitar with me. Even at this stage, we’re excited to write the next album.” Rogers says his songwriting is a kind of therapy. “You learn uncomfortable things about yourself,” he says. “There’s a real capacity for growth and learning in that. The most difficult part is unlearning all the things which made you want to hide in the first place.”
Opus Kink’s The Sweet Goodbye is out now via So Recordings.
