Description
Release Date Friday 23rd October 2026
All pre-orders will be dispatched/made ready for collection on that day.
Since forming in Cambridge in 2016, Ugly have been relentless live performers. Their breakout EP Twice Around The Sun, released in 2024, drew critical acclaim and established the six-piece band as one of the UK's most exciting and ambitious new bands.
Ugly have been building and shaping The South Facade - their debut album - for almost three years. Early writing sessions took place during extended retreats in a converted barn overlooking Ely Cathedral. Songs followed the band through rehearsal rooms, bedrooms, studios and eventually onto stages. Ideas were passed between members, arrangements dismantled and rebuilt, choruses rewritten and individual parts debated down to the smallest detail.
Some of the songs have become familiar fixtures of Ugly’s live shows. Audiences have watched The South Facade evolve in front of them and on 23rd October, they get to hear where the band landed.
Across the album, Ugly push at the boundaries of guitar music without losing the idiosyncrasies that have come to define them. Wiry, interlocking guitars rub against driving percussion and intricate choral harmonies whilst moments of raw power sit alongside meticulous arrangements.
Part of that sound emerged from the rules Ugly imposed upon themselves. Looking towards records by Television, XTC, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Prefab Sprout and Gentle Giant, the band became as interested in what they didn’t want to make as what they did. There are no instruments needlessly doubling one another, no easy sentimentality and no crescendo simply for crescendo's sake.
Recorded in Wales and completed in London with producer Balázs Altsach, The South Facade captures the density of that process without sanding away its spontaneity. For all the meticulous construction behind it, the record still carries the feeling of six friends discovering the songs together.
The announcement of their album follows the release last month of ‘Marina’, a swaggering, raw and playfully theatrical cut from the record.
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