The billionaires make it to space. The rest of us get to clean up the mess. That’s the contrast Windowhead opens with on Terrestrials, a four-track EP shaped by post-hardcore muscle and shoegaze haze, out March 28, 2025. The Brighton-based quartet is not interested in subtle metaphors this time around. Gone are the layers of lyrical ambiguity from their earlier work—Terrestrials strips the veil and directs its critique outward, clear and sharp.
The shift comes after years of being on stage. Windowhead has spent the last four years transforming from a bedroom project—2018’s Still Life and 2021’s Sunflowers—into a functioning live act. The influence of that transition is all over this release. Rhythmic unpredictability, louder contrasts, abrupt time signature shifts. Hooks, yes, but often delivered just before a structural collapse or instrumental chaos.
Thematically, Terrestrials runs on duality. Not in the sense of balancing opposites, but in exposing fractures. Socioeconomic, emotional, environmental—the contrasts are everywhere, from the EP artwork (rainbow skies clashing with bins and car wreckage) to the song structures themselves.
That fracture is most obvious in “Ex–Terrestrial,” both opener and ideological anchor. It confronts the growing divide between everyday people struggling in a collapsing world and the ultra-rich launching vanity rockets to escape it. The composition resists verse-chorus convention, instead moving in volatile waves—melodic intro, blast of screams and distortion, soaring hook, tension bridge, then a climactic outro. “It’s the opening song on both the EP and at our live shows for a reason,” the band explains. The frustration that shaped it is also visualized in the cover art: clear skies over chaos, dreamlike detachment from real-world decay.
“Cat Insulin” looks back further. Written during a period of obsession with Disco Elysium, it channels that game’s existential weariness into a track about failure, memory, and trying not to sink into defeatism. It’s also a foundational moment for the band—the first track written collectively with live performance in mind. Tonally leaning into Deftones-esque textures while borrowing rhythmic dissonance from At The Drive-In, it flips between restraint and urgency.
The lead single “Todd, Honey,” released February 28, 2025, pulls from math rock structures—starting from a bouncing rhythm that grows in complexity—and pairs it with lyrics that parody American libertarian gun culture. Written backwards (starting with the outro and working in reverse), it ends with a spaced-out instrumental, but not before winding through screaming passages and time signature twists. The lyrical bite lands with a clear political jab: men with assault rifles roaming grocery stores while claiming to fight state control, yet backing heavy policing when it suits their worldview. There’s humor buried in the satire—a Futurama reference, if you’re paying attention—but the target remains serious.
The final track, “I Had To Reach Out And Grab It Before It Disappeared Forever,” folds inward. More personal in tone, it deals with social anxiety and isolation. Slower and built on post-rock layering, it nods to the band’s earlier era while still carrying the learned weight of being a functioning live unit. It was the last song written with previous members Aljosha and Tyla, giving it the feel of a closing chapter—not just of the record, but of a particular phase in Windowhead’s development.
Beneath the distorted guitars and explosive climaxes, Terrestrials is an attempt to speak plainly. The targets are real: billionaires, media complicity, defeatism, gun fetishism, isolation. It’s not an abstract emotional exploration—it’s a statement, grounded in friction.
The band’s own commentary on each track follows.
Ex-Terrestrial
Ex-Terrestrial came together very naturally during the writing process. I sat down with our lead guitarist Joe Potts having only written the intro, but very quickly we were able to flesh out where to go next by ignoring traditional verse/chorus structure and allowing the song to ebb and flow naturally. This way, the track can develop intrigue in a melodic, intricate, but fast paced intro, explode into heavy chords and screaming and peak with a melodic hook before calling back to the intro in a tension-building bridge and ending in a climactic outro with call-and-response screams. It’s the opening song on both the EP and at our live shows for a reason. You might be able to tell that it’s my personal favourite.
Unlike the instrumental side of the song, the lyrics were borne out of frustration. While ordinary people were suffering from the social and economic impacts of the post-pandemic world and the impacts of the climate crisis were becoming more apparent, I was constantly seeing news stories about billionaires and their vanity space programmes. Their determination to waste money on something so frivolous seemed like such a slap in the face to the ordinary people who would be left behind on a dying Earth, when their money could instead be used to solve problems here.
As the (sort of) title track, the lyrics of the song are heavily reflected in the EP’s artwork, which contrasts a clear blue sky and a rainbow against the chaos of bins and cars in the foreground. Contrast is the key theme of the EP, whether it’s between the two halves of the artwork, the quiet and loud aspects of our music, or the super-rich and everyone else.
Cat Insulin
This song is particularly special to us because it’s the first song we wrote as a band. That might come as a surprise if you’ve already looked at our discography and noticed our previous two albums, but that’s because those were written and recorded by me in my bedroom (with contributions to the 2nd album from Joe and former bassist Liam McKeown). Cat Insulin was the first Windowhead song written with live performance in mind, resulting in a high energy song built around the contrast between quiet verses and a soaring chorus.
Tonally, the track was influenced heavily by Deftones’ more shoegaze-y work, resulting in the big splashy chords and echoey lead riff. But the song’s chaotic rhythms and general structure owe more to At The Drive-In.
The lyrics were inspired by the game Disco Elysium, which Joe and I were obsessed with when the song was written. Its depiction of a world ravaged by failed dreams and a main character who cannot move past a failed relationship is a poignant warning about the dangers of defeatism and the importance of moving on from the past. I hope I was able to channel that meaning into a song that’s ultimately optimistic about our ability to improve both society and our personal lives as long as we don’t allow ourselves to be weighed down by the past.
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Todd, Honey
While most of our songs begin with a melody, Todd, Honey is built around its bouncing rhythm. It starts very simple but becomes more complex as the other parts are slowly slotted into the mix, making it very satisfying to play. It also takes a lot of surprising twists and turns into screaming, time signature changes and a spacey instrumental outro, which keeps both us and the listeners on their toes. For these reasons and because of the catchy vocal melodies, it was a natural pick as the lead single for the EP.
The creative process for this one was a little strange as it was essentially written in reverse. We wrote the outro first after getting inspired by all the Math Rock and Post-Rock bands at a festival in Brighton called Bad Pond. The bridge part came after that, and the first half of the song was written last. But despite the oddness of this process, the song is united by its Math Rock influences. You can feel this in the bright chords of the intro, the unconventional time signature of the bridge, and the atmosphere of the outro.
Despite the upbeat nature of the instrumentals, the lyrics of the song focus on quite a dark topic. It takes a satirical approach in highlighting the absurdity of libertarian gun enthusiasts in the US wandering around their local supermarket with assault rifles and calls out their hypocrisy in claiming to be free from the state while also frequently siding with heavy-handed law enforcement when groups that they don’t like happen to be protesting.
I know that’s a heavy note to end on. So as a bonus, if you can find the Futurama reference in the lyrics, you will have won my respect.
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I Had To Reach Out And Grab It Before It Disappeared Forever
I’ve always been quite introverted and often struggle establishing myself in a group setting without having someone I already know to help me. I experience this at parties, at gigs and even at my 9-5. This song is about my struggles to get past this, so it’s more of a personal one for me.
Stylistically, Reach Out calls back more to the bedroom recording era of Windowhead; slowing the pace down and taking more of a Post-Rock approach to building up layers. But you can still sense us applying what we’ve learned as a live band in the intensity of the loud sections. The result is a track that has a lot in common with something from Thrice’s Vheissu or The Alchemy Index.
This was the last song we wrote for the EP, which means it was also the last song we wrote with our then drummer and bassist, Aljosha and Tyla. We’ve since recruited new members to fill their shoes and we’re already working on new music, but this makes it a really fitting song to close out the EP.
