CASSELS drag you through the dirt with excellent new album “Tracked In Mud”

The Beck brothers never made it easy for themselves. Jim and Loz grew up playing music together in a remote countryside bedroom, shaped by their dad’s record collection rather than the predictable hum of a television.

Cassels, as a band, started taking shape when Jim moved to London, finding himself adrift in a city where nobody knew his name. The early days were brutal—pay-to-play gigs with shady promoters, losing money on transport, and often performing to near-empty rooms.

Loz was still living at home, commuting three hours just to sneak into venues before bouncers showed up. There was no clear incentive to keep going, beyond the occasional small victory: a show outside their usual circuit, a chance to play with a band they admired. Somehow, they persisted.

‘Tracked In Mud,’ their latest album, is the sound of that persistence distilled into something heavier, weirder, and more confrontational than anything they’ve done before.

Released through Brighton’s Human Worth label on March 7, 2025, the album strips away the sardonic character studies and indie-rock flirtations of previous efforts, replacing them with something more primal.

Jim, exhausted by the pop-culture entanglements of their last record, immersed himself in Converge. The result is an album that doesn’t just reflect on humanity’s detachment from nature—it pummels that disconnection into the dirt, leaving only the raw elements behind.

Cassels have never followed a straight line, but ‘Tracked In Mud’ marks a deliberate shift in their songwriting. Jim approached their last record, ‘A Gut Feeling,’ with a strict rule: no first-person narratives.

This time, he went further, removing the narrator’s perspective altogether.

The result is something less literal, more associative, a collection of fragmented impressions rather than didactic statements. “On this record, I was aiming to leave more of an impression and a feeling, the way a good painting or a film can,” he explains. The change in approach is apparent across the album, where lyrics no longer spoon-feed meaning but leave space for interpretation—an evolution that suits the record’s broader themes.

At its core, ‘Tracked In Mud’ is about the ways human beings have tried to sanitize their own nature, imposing systems to suppress the baser instincts that remind us we’re still animals. It’s a record that revels in that tension, pulling between disgust and recognition, routine and entropy, industry and wilderness.

Field recordings, including the honking of geese, weave through the album, reinforcing the sense of something elemental breaking through the cracks of modern life.

For the first time since their debut EP, the Becks brought in producer Alex Petersen (Nyquist Noise, Vincent Vocoder Voice) to help shape the album.

The trio spent two weeks in Shaken Oak Studios hammering out something that felt less like a collection of songs and more like a document of life in a collapsing system.

It’s an album that swings between blunt-force trauma and eerie stillness—bludgeoning with one hand, beckoning with the other.

The release itself is as DIY as it gets. Human Worth, a label with a history of pressing unorthodox, noise-driven records, has put together a limited Eco-Mix Vinyl run. A special edition bundle includes a forty-page zine featuring Jim Beck’s lyrics and artwork, with 10% of proceeds going to The Hornbeam Centre, a community food hub.

‘Tracked In Mud’ doesn’t ease the listener in. Opener ‘Nine Circles’ is a warning shot, introducing Cassels’ shift into harsher, post-hardcore terrain with vocals that lean closer to abrasion than melody.

The influence of bands like Shellac, Bad Breeding, and Unsane is undeniable, though Cassels remain distinctly themselves—intentionally off-kilter, refusing to let anything settle into predictability.

Elsewhere, ‘Here Exists Creator’ tilts into noise-rock and math-rock territory, nodding to Shellac and Future of the Left, while ‘…And Descends’ channels the sludgy, overlooked brilliance of bands like Engine Kid.

‘Formaldehyde Time’ strips things back to a grinding minimalism, dredging up echoes of Fugazi and Swans, while ‘Two Dancing Tongues’ takes a detour into slow-burning doom, its second half unfolding into something heavier than anything Cassels have attempted before.

There’s no neat resolution to the album. ‘Nature Hates A Vacuum’ closes things out with nine minutes of sprawling tension, the band stretching their sound into something that feels less like a finale and more like an unraveling. It’s ambitious, at times disorienting, and deliberately difficult to pin down—a reflection of an album that isn’t interested in easy answers.

Cassels aren’t in a rush. The burnout from their last album cycle taught them the value of stepping back. In 2024, they played only one show. The focus was on writing without the looming pressure of the industry’s relentless churn.

Now, with the album out, they’re gearing up for a two-week tour with Pure Adult, testing out these songs in front of an audience for the first time. Check out the full list of dates below.

Beyond that, nothing is certain. Full-time jobs limit their ability to tour extensively, and Jim is balancing Cassels with commitments to his other band, The None, as well as caring for his and Loz’s grandmother. The constraints of real life press in, but that’s always been part of the story.

Cassels have never operated on anyone else’s timeline, and ‘Tracked In Mud’ is proof that slowing down hasn’t dulled their edge—it’s only made it sharper.

If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that Cassels have found their place in the UK’s underground noise ecosystem. Human Worth has become a natural home, placing them alongside bands like Remote Viewing, The Eurosuite, Sly & The Family Drone, and Kulk.

Baba Yaga’s Hut continues to book some of the most unconventional shows in London, while New River Studios remains a hub for the city’s noisy DIY scene—a space that, in Jim’s words, feels like “the closest thing London has to offer to a proper European DIY venue.”

‘Tracked In Mud’ is a great, honest document of where Cassels are now: heavier, more certain of themselves, and willing to embrace the uncertainty of what comes next.

Tour Dates with Pure Adult:

7th March – BE – Arlon, Entrepot
8th March – DE – Hamburg, MS Stubnitz
10th March – NO – Stavanger, Folken
11th March – NO – Bergen, Landmark
12th March – NO – Oslo, Revolver
13th March – SE – Stockholm, HUS7

Continued below…

14th March – DK – Copenhagen, Råhuset
15th March – DE – Berlin, Schokoladen
17th March – NL – Breda, Mezz
18th March – BE – Brussels, AB
19th March – NL – Nijmegen, Merleyn
20th March – FR – Paris, Supersonic
21st March – UK – Brighton, Daltons
22nd March – UK – London, Two Palms Hackney