The first time Hark! A Shark! properly came back, Nat Cottingham got to watch her kids watch the band. After years of feeling like music was still around her but not quite accessible to her anymore, that part landed hard. “At our comeback show our kids came to hear us play and it was lovely to see them proud of us,” she says. For a band that had been gone since 2016, it sounds like a small scene from the outside. It isn’t.
“Sirens,” out April 1, is Hark! A Shark!’s first new release in ten years, and the first look at the upcoming EP “Very Nice, Very Evil,” due this summer.
The five-piece — Natalie Cottingham on vocals, Greg Thomas on bass, Greg Burke on guitar, Craig Butterworth on guitar, and Matt Lawrence on drums — pull from Newport, Cardiff, Chippenham and Johannesburg by way of shared history, old friendships, and a version of pop punk that still knows how to leave a bruise.
Back when the band split, they were not on the same page about what they wanted from each other or from the band itself. Cottingham was a new mum. Greg Burke was travelling for work. Everyone was in a different place outside the band, and, as she puts it, they were “people that just didn’t know how to communicate with purpose.” The breakup sent them in different directions. Over the next decade they each joined other bands, though in her case it was short-lived, and none of it felt quite the same.
Music never left. Cottingham’s husband plays in Brightr, and their children grew up around shows and rehearsal-room life, watching him keep that part of himself active. But being close to music and being inside it are different things. For a long stretch, she says, being part of anything musical “didn’t feel like something that was accessible for me or that I could be part of.”
The push to start again came last year at Manchester Punk Festival. Greg Thomas was there with his wife — another Nat, who plays in There’s Always Time — when they caught Coral Springs at Gorilla. What stuck was not some grand revelation about legacy or unfinished business.
It was simpler than that: a band being completely itself and having fun doing it. “It was inspiring seeing a band that were unapologetically themselves and most importantly, having fun,” Cottingham says. “It reminded us of what we were like as a band and what we enjoyed about being in a band.” That set the whole thing in motion, followed by a run of “very honest and vulnerable conversations.”
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Lawrence, a long-time friend of both Greg Burke and Greg Thomas, joined on drums, with Butterworth stepping in on lead guitar. Cottingham says both have changed the shape of the band. “Both of their styles and creativity have made our sound evolve. Everyone has an equal say in bringing something to the table.” The old chemistry is still there, but it has been reworked into something less fixed and more open.
That matters on “Sirens,” a song built around the moment where familiarity stops feeling safe and starts feeling poisonous. Cottingham describes it as “a commentary about the toxicity of friendships/relationships,” about being drawn toward a person or a situation because it is close at hand or because it feels known, then finally seeing the damage clearly enough to step away. “It’s about the power and clarity that comes from recognising that.”
The lyrics stay right inside that loop of repetition and dread. “I know we have to start from somewhere / I’m sick of feeling we’re stuck in nowhere,” Cottingham sings, before pushing deeper into the pattern: “With a history of endings where should I begin.” Later, the chorus puts the pressure in plain terms: “Sirens scream so loud at me / It’s almost deafening each time we speak.” By the time she gets to “My hope’s long gone,” the song has already made its point. It is less about one dramatic collapse than the dead routine of knowing a thing is bad for you and staying still anyway.
That sense of starting again while doubting every move carries into the rest of “Very Nice, Very Evil.” “Restless” deals with anxiety, age, and the unease of putting yourself and your music back out there after a long absence, then waiting to see how it lands.
“Dead Flowers” turns toward loss — how grief takes pieces with it, how people keep trying to move forward while the unknown, the unanswered, and the unfinished keep dragging them back. “The happy stuff,” Cottingham says.
For all that, Hark! A Shark! have never been interested in treating themselves too seriously. There is still a lot of bounce in what they do, still a taste for hooks, speed, and a title that sounds like it should come with a B-movie poster folded inside the sleeve. Older write-ups got that balance right: one described them as a band that “doesn’t take itself too seriously and instead offers a joyous, fun filled, booty shaking evening,” while another pitched them to anyone who likes their pop punk “a little old school and on the crunchy, bouncy energetic side.”
The band’s own shorthand is even better: back from their “deep watery grave,” still making shark-punned pop punk with a little emotion mixed in.
“Sirens” was written and performed by Hark! A Shark!, with words by Natalie Cottingham and music by Greg Burke, Greg Thomas, Craig Butterworth and Matt Lawrence. It was recorded at One Louder Studios in Newport and mixed by Joey B.
Their comeback single works as a clean line between the band that stopped in 2016 and the one standing here now, a decade older and finally better at saying what needs to be said. “Sirens” feels most convincing as proof of something less tidy: sometimes the second life of a band starts when everyone finally stops deflecting.
For anyone wanting to catch them in a room instead of through headphones, the current run of dates includes April 1 at Porters in Cardiff.
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