Bring Yourself (Coke Bottle Vinyl)

Making their first album since 2019 wasn’t even on the cards when The Twang first tip-toed back into the studio two years ago. The death of lead songwriter Jon Watkin’s wife, a friendship in freefall and the feeling that their best might be behind them had pushed the Birmingham band to the brink of collapse.

Then Bring Yourself arrived. What began as a bridge-building exercise, a way to get four working-class lads to look each other in the eye and be honest, morphed into a manifesto for living in the moment and gave The Twang back their groove. None of them know how it happened. Magic, suggests Jon. That’ll do.

Recorded live and produced by Ross Orton (Arctic Monkeys, M.I.A), It was Ross who gave Bring Yourself its title and its powerful, back-to-basics sound. “Ross had this phrase, ‘Bring thissen’, which became our mantra,” says Phil. “It means be yourself, bring the real you and no other nonsense. Ross is a no-bullshit Northerner, which was exactly what we needed”. Two decades since The Twang’s breakthrough debut album, the gold-selling Love It When I Feel Like This, Bring Yourself comes as a celebration - of the gang being back on track, of their new-found respect for each other and of their love of a life they’ve been lucky to lead. And despite their differences, this decade has seen The Twang in great form, playing by far the largest venues of their career, and the Noughties’ indie-rock scene that the band helped spawn is bigger now than it’s ever been