Dead Club City

For many rock bands, there comes a moment when they have to confront a particular question. It’s one that has often inspired dazzlingly inventive and progressive work. Occasionally though, it only brings shame and derision. For Southend-formed five-piece Nothing But Thieves, that question became too loud to ignore while they gathered ideas for their fourth LP. So they finally asked themselves, “Is it time to make a concept album?” Released in October 2020, NBT’s third album Moral Panic presented their most adventurous work to date—absorbing drum ’n’ bass, hip-hop, Balearic dance pop and R&B into their sound. With the group unable to tour during the pandemic, their heads stayed with that record for longer than they normally might, and they eventually extended its universe the following summer with the Moral Panic II EP. They were keen to continue their sonic explorations on this follow-up but needed to ensure they were completely detached from Moral Panic. “A concept was almost like a tool to feel automatically fresh,” guitarist Joe Langridge-Brown tells Apple Music. “But it wasn’t lost on us that it’s kind of a cliché. ‘How do we do this and not make it too pastiche?’ was very much a daily conversation and consideration.” While starting to write songs for the record, Langridge-Brown pondered a few concepts, eventually settling on the idea of a city-sized members-only club. Here, the stories and characters within and outside its walls could reflect on the potential consequences of the way we live today. “The concept is pointless unless there is real-world meaning behind each of the songs,” he says. “Moral Panic felt like it was about the health of our society and what I was viewing on Twitter, the chaos of that. This album feels like it’s in the future—what the nth degree of [that chaos] is if things kept going. What might happen in this sort of dystopian, segregated, members-only city?” Read on as he guides us through that vision, track by track. “Welcome to the