Since the beginning of the decade, the Windmill scene has been one of indie rock’s most prevalent forces. From pioneers like Black Country, New Road and Squid to upstarts such as My New Band Believe and the Last Dinner Party, much of the twenties’ definitive indie music has ties to South London’s Brixton neighborhood. Known for its knotty, cerebral brand of post-punk, the Windmill scene’s crop of bands covers a wide, stylistic gamut while feeling tethered to a particular cultural enclave. But there’s another South London indie rock collective that people don’t discuss nearly as much, one that, like their Windmill peers, is pointedly attuned to the new-wave fashions of decades past. Roughly five miles northeast of Brixton is Surrey Quays, home to the Windmill scene’s snottier, brattier brethren in Gob Nation. “We wanted to be part of that DIY indie pop scene but we were also obsessed with being like, ‘But we’re punks as well,’” Owen Williams told The Guardian in 2023. “There was this weird tension where we were obviously into pop music but trying to ruin it all the time.” As the frontman for Welsh jangle-rock quartet the Tubs (and former member of Joanna Gruesome), Williams is a Gob Nation mainstay. Through the Tubs’ songwriting, Williams may as well be a paragon of the collective’s tenets. He’s gifted with a penchant for melodies stickier than a beer-soaked club floor, which he sets to tales so humiliating that they invoke both pathos and aversion. He welcomes your sympathy, but he totally gets it if you wince and avert your gaze anyway. Such is the world of Hard Life, the Tubs’ third album and first for Merge, a document of romantic foibles and drunken humiliation cloaked in off-kilter, distressed pop music. The album opener and title track is among Hard Life’s best offerings, a mix of the Replacements’ “Can’t Hardly Wait,” eighties R.E.M., and Morrissey’s pitch-shifted vocals on “Bigmouth Strikes Again.” Guitarist Dan Lucas’ hammer-ons and pull-offs settle pleasantly into the steady rhythmic backing from bassist Max Warren and drummer Taylor Stewart, but the real star of the show here is fiddle-player Chris Haigh, best known for his work on Steps’ late-nineties dance-pop hit “5, 6, 7, 8,” a far cry from the Tubs’ grungy jangle. Haigh’s performance reaches for the rafters, the strings counteracting the song’s abrasion with soothing sweetness. On “Who’s Gonna Love You Now?,” Lucas joins Williams in his Smiths worship with a dead-on Johnny Marr impression, summoning the plucky verve of Marr’s six-string style and injecting a breezy edge into the Tubs’ punkish chug. That Marrian emulation appears yet again on the five-plus-minute “In Your Place,” which plays like an extended version of “Still Ill,” now with a fiddle-led outro that prevents the tune from becoming pure pastiche. “Who’s Gonna Love You Now?” leads directly into “If You Don’t Love Me,” a sequence that lays on the desperation thicker than a Tolstoy novel. Whereas the former’s narrator points and laughs at someone’s poor decisions (“Baby, it’s your life / but who’s gonna be there waiting when it falls down?”), the latter finds Williams mired in such a scenario, now laughing at himself instead (“It’s funny sometimes / that you don’t love me”). The Tubs follow that up with “Stoop to Me,” which voids all humor in lieu of self-contempt. “I don’t wanna spend my life / waiting for the day you see / the day you stoop to me,” Williams sings, his voice laced with loathing. That cynicism turns tender on the acoustic number “Didn’t I Say?,” which sounds less like Bob Mould and more like Blues Traveler’s “Run-Around.” “Didn’t I say when the chips are down / that no one ever really comes around,” Williams sings, the dejection at its apex. It’s a rare moment of sober reflection that pushes the envelope of what a Tubs song can be. Aside from the occasional addition of Haigh’s fiddle, the most noticeable shake-up from 2023’s Dead Meat and 2025’s Cotton Crown is Hard Life’s length. The Tubs’ first two records, each clocking in under a half-hour, felt fresher for their mix of self-deprecation and jangle-pop riffs. Williams’ introspective lyrics on Cotton Crown, largely centered on his mother’s death by suicide, reckoned with grief and shame in ways that evolved the band beyond boozy hedonism and built on the blueprint of their debut. Hard Life, by contrast, lacks the focus that made their first two records more gripping. At roughly forty-one minutes, the Tubs’ formula, which hasn’t altered much since Dead Meat, wears thin a bit faster. Absent is the immediate punch that grants their previous releases a longer shelf life. These feel-bad anthems set to sunny hooks are a fun time, but they rarely transcend their comfortable template. For the most part, it’s a retread, but Hard Life still presents the Tubs in top form, ruining pop music in their own image. [Merge] Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.