“We blew the budget on a wall of death”: Shame go all-in on their new album

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We’re sitting in Shame singer Charlie Steen’s flat on a murky July afternoon as he makes us a coffee, presented in a vintage Prince Charles and Lady Diana wedding mug. He clutches his own coffee as he sits down, exhausted after a very late night filming the video for new song ‘Spartak’, taken from the band’s fourth album. “I was directing it,” he explains. “We did some filming from 6pm until 10:30pm, then me and Will Geffing, the director of photography, met back up at 3:30am to do a load more filming – I’m going to look a lot worse in that part of the video, freezing cold and tired wandering around central London. Jesus, I hope it turns out all right,” he adds with a laugh.

Sound oddly low-cost for a band playing decent-sized venues? “Well, it’s only because we blew all of our money on the video for ‘Cutthroat’,” he says with a grin. “I wanted a wall of death and a guy riding a motorbike around the band, which apparently isn’t cheap. We put this stuff on ourselves, really, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s a challenge for us, and we enjoy the DIY side of things as well. 

“I directed this partly because of budget but also because I love music videos. We’ve never had the biggest YouTube demographic; it’s never been our thing, but it’s a format I really care about. Even though our videos don’t reach the biggest number of people, I still like doing them and I still like watching them; it’s a fun part of the job for me.”

Regardless of the joy felt at the final product, shivering in central London trying to direct a music video at 4am isn’t the height of glamour, but then Shame have never exactly been a band who revel in excess. Emerging from under Fat White Family’s wing in the Queen’s Head in Brixton, debut single ‘One Rizla’ (recently named one of Dork’s best songs of the past 100 issues) burst spitting and snarling into an indie scene which was in desperate need of a bit of grit. What followed was first christened the South London Scene before swiftly being rebranded and enlarged as the now ubiquitous post-punk revival. 

“For us it’s really weird,” says Charlie, reflecting on the tidal wave of similar bands who crashed through the country’s small venues around the same time as Shame. “Most of the people are our mates – IDLES, Fontaines D.C, Squid, Viagra Boys; they’re all just people we love seeing. We do festivals, and the nicest part is seeing all these bands who we’ve known for years now and getting to catch up with them. It’s good to be part of that community, and I think we feel lucky that a lot of our friends just make very good music.”

Not that Shame are any slouches in that department, either. Across ‘Cutthroat’ and their previous three albums, they’ve carved a path for themselves which has expanded on their early sound without compromising it. As comfortable now with the slow burn of ‘Burning By Design’ as they are with the frenetic pace of new album ‘Cutthroat’’s title-track, there’s a sense of a band who have total confidence in their abilities. Plus, they’re probably the only band of their ilk who can boast a Phoebe Bridgers collaboration, even though her contribution to ‘Adderall’ is, well, completely inaudible.

“There’s a lot of firsts on ‘Cutthroat’ actually”

As an album, ‘Cutthroat’ pushes at those sonic boundaries more than ever before. Take ‘Lampião’, a mid-album track about a Brazilian bandit, which opens with a folk song in Portuguese. “My girlfriend’s mum is Brazilian,” explains Charlie. “We were visiting Brazil, and her mum took me out for this Northeastern Brazilian food called acarajé and started telling me about the history of the 20th century in Brazil, including Lampião. He and Maria Bonita, his partner, were these Bonnie and Clyde characters who were super famous in Brazil. They were cangaço, which means that they were bandits, but a guy called Volta Sêca, who joined their gang when he was nine years old, wrote these songs about them, and they had this big impact on Brazilian culture, which I found fascinating.

“What I love is that it’s all word of mouth and it’s all hard to prove, but it was one person versus the whole of Brazil. This is a backlands bandit who did interviews, who had his photo taken. It’s a paradox to be on the run but also to somehow be such a public figure, and this album is about paradox more than it’s about anything else, so it felt like a good fit. Plus, I found it odd that this guy was completely unknown to me. We all know Jesse James and Billy the Kid, but to our part of the world, Lampião is basically unknown.” He pauses and laughs. “Although I am always pronouncing his name wrong, even on the fucking record! I was sending voice notes to my girlfriend from the studio to try and get it right, but I don’t think I did.”

Counterbalancing this more acoustic end of ‘Cutthroat’ is the electronic influence of tracks like ‘After Party’ and ‘Axis of Evil’. “I feel like both of those are in the same world,” says Charlie. “Sean [Coyle-Smith, Shame’s bassist] and Forbes [Charlie Forbes, the band’s drummer] are really interested in that kind of Depeche Mode-y electronic stuff, which comes through on those. Lyrically, it’s this American Psycho type character, which was a fun concept to play with. Live it becomes something very different, though. It’s a lot heavier, a lot louder, I’m basically shouting it.

“Ordering the record was quite hard,” he continues, referencing ‘Axis of Evil’’s placement as the album closer. “We usually have a longer song like ‘Angie’ or ‘Station Wagon’ to close us out, but this album doesn’t have one of those. There’s a lot of firsts on ‘Cutthroat’ actually, just little things like it being our first summer release, the first time we haven’t done a three-word album name. Nothing drastic, but enough to keep it fresh and allow us room.”

These disparate influences have always been present in some capacity for Shame, but seven years on from their debut album, there’s a quiet confidence which allows them to experiment more without worrying the wheels are going to come off. This is bolstered by the response when the band play live, always the place they’ve been most comfortable. More than maybe any other band around, Shame were forged by live performance and still rely on it to shape their music and let them know what’s working. “We started at the Queen’s Head, and we would always have the landlord or Forbes’ dad or someone giving us an opinion,” explains Charlie. “We need that, we need someone we trust or the feedback from a live crowd to let us know what works.”

“At the core, it’s about embracing insecurities”

This live-first ethos runs right through everything Shame do. From secret shows debuting new material at Brixton’s Windmill (billed as ‘Almost Seamus’) to an album announce show at Electric Brixton for ‘Cutthroat’, they’re never too far from a sweaty venue. “It’s maintained us,” says Charlie. “Whether or not the recorded songs mirror that, it’s always been the centre of the band.” 

Nowhere is this more evident than in the sheer pace of ‘Cutthroat’, an album which, as Charlie told us back in June, was conceived as a way to get the tempo of their setlists up without borrowing too heavily from their debut album. In doing so, parts of that debut are mirrored across the new album, not least the defiant attitude of ‘Spartak’, reminiscent of ‘One Rizla’ in its rejection of the judgment of others. “At the core, it’s about embracing insecurities,” explains Charlie. “Just shouting that I don’t want to be part of the cool gang, I want to be with the weirdos. That’s where it started as a song, but it’s also a bit petty, and I think Shame has always been petty as a band. It’s a contradiction, really – don’t judge me, because here I am judging you.

“A lot of the music I listen to is for the outcasts and people who are insecure. That’s why a lot of people go to music, for escapism. Hopefully this album can serve that need as well as embodying what it’s like to be one of the misfits. It’s paradoxical and a bit petty, but it’s not sung with a scowl, it’s sung with a smile.”

Taken from the September 2025 issue of Dork. Shame’s album ‘Cutthroat’ is out 5th September.