We Are Nobody

The Chap are nuts, right' They're so weird that even guys who are pretty weird themselves think the Chap are weird. Their music is a hectic hybrid of almost everything that ever happened in modern Western society, which means it's really poppy but also quite screechy and detached and has really weird lyrics about cloning oneself and getting positive feedback from one's boss. Weird.

But after almost ten years of weirding out everybody over the course of hundreds of intense live shows, four albums and even a "best of" compilation, The Chap have finally let their sensitive side get the better of them, resulting in their distinctly melancholy fifth album. Written, recorded and produced by the band in London and Berlin over the first half of 2011, We Are Nobody is the most unified-sounding Chap album to date. It contains eleven beautiful statements of loss, dislocation, nostalgia and defeat, mostly in a traditional pop-song format and embedded in a surprisingly soothing and restrained sonic environment. It's all infectious, blistering pop music—but all the while something is deliciously wrong here. We Are Nobody is another intriguing and exciting collection of outsider pop from one of the UK's most original bands.