The South Facade

Description

Ugly today announce their long-awaited debut album The South Facade, arriving 30 October 2026. Since forming in Cambridge in 2016, the six-piece have spent the best part of the last decade relentlessly gigging which eventually led to 2024’s breakout EP Twice Around The Sun, which drew critical acclaim and established Ugly as one of the UK's most exciting and ambitious new bands. Written over almost three years, The South Facade has been taking shape alongside much of that journey. Rather than bringing finished material into the room, Ugly would gather together and build collectively. Early writing sessions took place during extended retreats in a converted barn overlooking Ely Cathedral, before songs followed the band through rehearsal rooms, bedrooms, studios and eventually onto stages. Ideas were passed between members, arrangements dismantled and rebuilt, choruses rewritten at the eleventh hour and individual parts debated down to the smallest detail. Some of the songs on their debut album have already become familiar fixtures of Ugly’s live shows. Audiences have effectively watched The South Facade evolve in real time and on 30 October, they finally get to hear where the band landed. This big announcement follows their return earlier this month with ‘Marina’, a swaggering, raw and playfully theatrical cut from the record. It joins last year’s ‘Gallowine’ on their debut album, with the full tracklisting revealed below. 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.