Bristol’s Bible Club release their second EP Umbra on April 11 via Velvet Echoes, offering a conceptually unified and musically ambitious dive into a society on the brink. It’s their most pointed and cohesive work to date — five tracks that cut through the delusions of consumerism with a sharp mix of noise, dissonance, and reflective dread.
At its core, Umbra is a record about the weight of systems too large to fight head-on. “Umbra captures the stark awareness of a world stuck in disarray,” the band states. The EP centers on a shadow metaphor — the umbra — described by the band as “a shadow cast by a force that overpowers,” a fitting image for a cultural and political environment defined by disconnection, routine, and passive consumption.
The band filters that mood through spoken word, abrasive guitars, and rhythm sections that recall krautrock’s motorik pulse — a cold, marching drive underneath the chaos.
Rather than delivering the themes track by track here, Bible Club’s commentary offers a deeper look into what Umbra is about as a whole. From the outset, they build an atmosphere of haunting clarity: “The EP begins with a sonic introduction… more innocent and hopeful before the inevitable crash into the darker reality of our time.”
From there, the songs chart a path through personal detachment, internal conflict, and wider societal breakdown. I Forget Everything wrestles with “fighting with our own internal pathologies,” while Loose Pavement explores “the traumatic and isolating effect that war and violence have on individuals forced to engage with it.” This isn’t escapism. It’s a focused, often heavy reflection on the world’s current state — and the internal impact of living within it.
The title track Umbra itself becomes the record’s thematic centerpiece. It’s “a dreary rumination on the state of affairs in this post-consumerist world,” the band writes, “a cry of hope that there is something better, more worthwhile, beneath it all.”
The EP’s production, handled by Dom Mitchison, pushes Bible Club into more layered territory. The band notes it was “a massive inspiration,” helping them shape a vision that moves beyond their debut EP AD. “It felt like a studio experience that we’ve truly grown from,” they say — and that growth is audible. Umbra holds together in its pacing and structure, evolving without losing momentum.
The final track, Plastic Apples, is the loudest and most chaotic — and purposefully so. “An anthemic closer,” the band calls it, built from “chaotic walls of sound” that reflect the EP’s cynicism toward consumerism. “The verses merge punchy grooves with loose and open turnarounds,” they explain, before it all collapses into a noise-soaked outro that releases the pressure built up over the record’s runtime.
Formed in 2021, Bible Club continue to shape their voice within Bristol’s experimental scene. Their influences — Can, Electrelane, Spacemen 3 — seep into the background, but it’s the band’s ability to translate the bleakness of now into raw sound and sharp lyrics that defines Umbra.
With this release, they move further into that shadowed space they’ve carved — tense, critical, and self-aware.
