East London’s IAN step into their debut with a kind of disarming candor—five old friends returning to loud music after years of other lives, pulling drone, post-metal, and post-rock into something that feels both heavy and lightly self-aware.
“Come On Everybody, Let’s Do Nothing!” landed on October 17 via Human Worth, and the record carries a tone shaped as much by their long-running camaraderie as by the riffs themselves.
The material comes from a shared history stretching back to Exeter’s early-2000s DIY scene, where these same musicians crossed paths in short-lived bands, worked at the Cavern Club, and built habits of collaboration long before IAN existed. The reunion happened during the pandemic, with the band quickly moving from getting reacquainted to writing and recording. By 2023 they were already playing shows across London and booking time with producer Wayne Adams at Bear Bites Horse.
That studio choice sets much of the record’s character. Adams gives the five dirges an open, breathing quality—guitars and cello take turns stretching into space before collapsing into thick, slow movement.
The band call themselves “a band that appreciates the peaks and troughs of post-rock as much as the crunch of the riff,” and the sound reflects exactly that: long arcs, submerged melodies, abrupt volume shifts, and that sense of endurance running through the arrangements.
The references sit plainly in their playing—shadows of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in the pacing, hints of Cult of Luna and Amenra in the weight, and a patient drift that treats quiet parts as seriously as the loud ones.
But the underlying pivot of IAN is the humor threaded through the seriousness.
Ted Reynolds laughs about the contrast: “Honestly, I just find a lot of the seriousness of the music funny, and I’m not good at writing serious lyrics because they always sound like a sincere teenager has written them; so I write silly things about Midsomer Murders or crisps.” That attitude holds the tension in place.
The band’s sound is stern, sometimes bleak, yet the people behind it lean toward warmth and silliness. Cellist Hannah Asprey puts it plainly: “We are all just inherently silly people who also happen to like making a big ominous racket.” Bassist Anna Jones adds that the humor shifts the temperature from within: “Imbuing dark, heavy sounding music with a sense of humour makes it feel lighter when we’re playing… The world’s bad enough, let’s sing about snack eggs.”
The album title itself grew out of that mix of affection and fatigue.
Reynolds explains that his child used to repeat the phrase at home, almost as a kind of consolation. Drummer Bob D’Mello hears another layer in it: a tired, half-serious nihilism. “Doing nothing can be an act of protest in and of itself,” he says, describing the way the title’s ambiguity lets listeners find their own meaning.
The band have lived enough years around DIY circles to know the exhaustion that sits under that joke. Asprey notes that real life in London wears people down, and sometimes choosing to spend one’s limited energy playing in an experimental noise band is itself a pushback against expectation.
The record’s cinematic edge comes straight from guitarist and visual artist Craig Murray. He shot the cover on medium-format film during a moment he didn’t think would produce anything usable: “I didn’t even think I’d got the shot… it’s just a snapshot.” The double exposure and grain match the music’s sense of drifting between moods. Jones describes the wider visual approach as instinctively analogue—photos from Mount Etna on the insert, grainy textures, an aesthetic that feels lived-in rather than stylized: “The music, by its nature, is very cinematic, so it makes sense that the record is more than just an aural experience.”
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Cello and field recordings push that cinematic quality into the arrangements. D’Mello calls Asprey’s playing “absolutely essential… it allows us to create space, depth, contrast and nuance.”
She remembers hearing the early demos and immediately knowing where the cello would sit: it can soften or darken, thicken the low end or cut through as a lead voice. The field recordings connect the pieces into a slow fade between movements—“where there are no real ends and no real beginnings,” as D’Mello puts it.
Across the tracklist, the band lean into long forms. “Manuel” opens with sharp sludge, then recedes into cello and whispering guitars. “Building Pyramids” stretches the post-rock rise to its limit, growing from silence into full rupture.
Lead single “Fennel” hits the most direct metal stride, drawing from the intensity of Neurosis and Cult of Luna, before cresting into its melodic height.
The band mention Midsomer Murders as a key reference, which fits the slightly off-kilter mood beneath the heaviness. “Selma” holds back until the halfway point, giving the cello room to lead before the drums tilt the song into motion. And the closing track, “Not Erotic / Cop Film (End Credits),” becomes the record’s longest breath—natural harmonics and cello shaping a film-score feel before the riff finally drops. Adams appears again here on mellotron, pushing the ending into something more expansive without breaking the record’s internal logic.
The band joke about their own identity—“IAN is a whisper on the wind, the fur of a cat, the laugh of a baby, the scowl of an old man, the skin of a leper”—a line delivered with enough absurdity to match the album’s tone. But beneath it, they’re clear about the themes running through the project: procrastination, fatigue, humor, the pressure of everyday life, and the strange relief that comes from embracing “doing nothing” without apology. Ted Reynolds simplifies it: lying around, watching TV, building a model aeroplane. D’Mello backs him up: “Ted is not stupid but I can confirm he’s very lazy. A man after my own tired heart.”
Human Worth released “Come On Everybody, Let’s Do Nothing!” on vinyl and digital formats, and a portion of Bandcamp proceeds will support Mermaids, a UK charity working with trans, non-binary, and gender-questioning young people.
IAN‘s live activity has been steady since re-forming, with shows across the south of Britain and lineups alongside Hundred Year Old Man, Kulk, Skloss, Holy Scum, Shy Low, A Burial At Sea, The Death Of Money and others. They returned to London on September 16 at New Cross Inn and celebrated the album launch on October 17 at Blondies.
For a band rooted in decades of friendship, the record feels like a document of shared language—heavy music shaped not by trauma or self-mythology, but by the everyday blend of laziness, humour, noise, and the small freedoms found in doing as little as possible together. Yet another great post-something release from Human Worth and the UK in general, thriving with so many amazing artists these days.
