Bristol’s Sugar Horse have announced their third album, “Not A Sound In Heaven,” due 10th April 2026 via Fat Dracula Records. The lead single “Secret Speech” dropped today, with a music video already streaming. A run of UK headline dates follows in April, capped off with an appearance at Strangeforms Festival in Leeds.
A band that’s been bending sludge, noise and electronic damage into shapes nobody asked for since 2015, Sugar Horse have never been ones to make things easy — not for themselves, not for whoever’s listening. Their 2024 second record “The Grand Scheme of Things” via Pelagic Records was proof enough of that. “Not A Sound In Heaven” goes further and cuts closer to the bone: Western empire, its machinery, its body count, and the comfortable numbness of anyone living inside it. Frontman Ash Tubb wastes no time on pleasantries.
“Ever since I was born I can remember visions of war, famine, and death being beamed directly into my living room via the magic of television,” says frontman Ash Tubb. “These visions were accompanied by newsreader narratives designed to either humanise or dehumanise the people involved. We humanise our government’s allies and dehumanise their enemies. This is taken as common sense, or even wisdom to some degree. People watch the news and accept it as fact, simple and true.”
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Seven tracks. The record deals with what Tubb calls “the cynical, antiquated politics” that keeps the global order running the way it does — Western wealth built on extraction, populations exploited, and a comfortable numbness maintained at home through media narratives that sort the world into allies and enemies. He’s not interested in sloganeering. The album’s position is more like a slow, uncomfortable reckoning with complicity.
“We are fortunate enough to live in what is generally known as ‘The West.’ I say fortunate with gritted teeth, because I know — as I’m sure the reader knows — that living in the West isn’t always rosy. The vast majority of people struggle everyday to feed, clothe and house themselves. Let alone receive adequate healthcare, schooling and workers’ rights.”
“We are, however, where all the world’s wealth is hoarded. We are at the centre of Empire. The people outside of this empire — those of the Global South — have had their resources extracted and their populations exploited by our own governments, with very little given back in return. This won’t go on forever. It will inevitably end, as all great empires do.”
“We in The West have a choice to make in the meantime; either help create a new, fairer world, or let the greed of our ruling classes become the undoing of all of us.”
That’s the ground “Secret Speech” stakes out — less protest song, more slow-burning indictment dressed in volume.
Tubb sees three possible responses to the version of reality people are handed growing up. You swallow it whole. You reject everything and slide into nihilism. Or you start pulling at the threads and find out the picture underneath is worse than the one on the surface. The album sits in that third space — what he calls “an aged acceptance” of living at the centre of empire, military and economic, and knowing the national story doesn’t match reality.
The weight of that isn’t lost on him. “How does a person cope with the weight — and, frankly, the guilt — of a society that perpetuates such distinct inequalities? A society that thinks a bit of killing abroad is fine, as long as it improves the lives of people at home. You can see why so many choose to embrace it. Hell, nihilism seems pretty sensible. Once a person decides upon pursuing a degree of truth however, things get a bit depressing. Beyond depressing…maddening.”
And then, because it’s Sugar Horse: “This album explores this kind of breezy, frivolous subject matter in a manner that will no doubt be uplifting to the listener and massively financially rewarding for the artist.”
The recording method hasn’t changed — 90% live in a room, no click tracks, one or two takes per song. Tubb says they like it that way because it keeps things sounding “a bit edgy, off kilter and like they’re always kinda on the edge of falling to bits.” What did change is that since the last album they’ve built their own studio, and this time the songs weren’t rehearsed at all before the sessions. They wrote and recorded in the same sitting. You can hear that, apparently — Tubb says the urgency is baked in.
Sonically, the record pushes into new places. The band were deep into electronic and dance music during the writing — broken guitar sounds that lean toward harsh noise, dance-inflected drums and bass, and a closing track that’s a full-on exploration of dub. Tubb also calls it their most pop record in a way. The songs are shorter, hookier, more direct. He’d been spending time with Bill Withers and old soul records, drawn to something in the phrasing and rhythm he wanted to fold into Sugar Horse.
The tension between the industrial and electronic side and the more dreamlike, synth-pop passages is real, but Tubb says there’s no careful balancing act behind it. They just like slamming those extremes together. “Most of the time, if you make the change as extreme as you possibly can, it ends up fitting way more than trying to fanny around with subtlety.” He describes their music as hamfisted, simple, nothing too precise — and this record just runs with that and rubs it in the listener’s face.
A few specific tracks have roots in places worth noting. “Fire Graphics” is built around William Blum’s Killing Hope — a book that catalogues the crimes of the American Empire across the 20th century and the people those crimes landed on.
“History’s Biggest T-Shirts” is something else entirely. The lyrics are direct quotes and lightly reworked passages from a speech by Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile, delivered from the presidential palace while he and his men were under fire from a CIA-backed military coup installing Augusto Pinochet. Allende was killed a couple of hours later.
“Company Town” draws from Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle — the idea that life under capital is an illusion where choice itself is manufactured, where our actions feel like they carry weight but in reality change nothing. We’re stuck inside the spectacle. All we can do is consume.
The surprise double drop from late 2025 — “What’s Your ETA? Let’s Have A Tear Up” / “Would You Like Me To Be The Cat?” — were experiments, basically. Small electronic-leaning pieces that let the band test ideas without committing them to a full record. “That’s the fun of singles, you can kinda push the envelope as much as you like, without needing to marry it into a complete record.” The album takes those experiments and cements them into the architecture properly.
As for what comes next, Tubb has no concrete answer. There’s been talk of a full slowcore record — “which I’m sure our fanbase will absolutely despise” — and he’s curious about pushing further into noise, maybe something entirely atonal. The honest answer is anything and everything.
The April tour is naturally built around the new stuff. Tubb says the record was designed to be played live, so expect the same volume and the same stage presence — which he describes as “the kind of stage rapport you’d normally expect from a working men’s club comic twice my age/who’s dead.”
Tour Dates:
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– 14.04.26 — Cardiff — Clwb Ifor Bach
– 15.04.26 — Manchester — Star & Garter
– 16.04.26 — Glasgow — Nice ‘n’ Sleazy
– 17.04.26 — Nottingham — The Old Bus Depot
– 18.04.26 — London — The Black Heart
– 19.04.26 — Leeds — Strangeforms Festival
“Not A Sound In Heaven” is out 10th April 2026 via Fat Dracula Records.
