With their ever-mutating brand of jazz-and-country-laced punk, Opus Kink have always cut a singular figure in a saturated landscape. Making their name with incendiary, cult-like live shows, the band - formed in Brighton (UK) in 2017 - have developed a sound as elusive as it is recognisable. Underscored by a formidable horn section and ragged, sardonic delivery, the band bear passing resemblance to post-punk and no-wave acts like The Pop Group, Birthday Party and Lounge Lizards, but it’s the weaving of older, more traditional influences - choral, folk, country, Latin, Weimar cabaret, cruise-ship-crooning - into the fabric of their music that sets them apart. Through their songs concerning violence, evil, shame, troubled sexual politics, anxiety and emptiness, all served with a wry absurdist bent, Opus Kink craft an alluring nether-world for their voracious audiences to plunge into.
They tore through the UK and Europe in the early years of the group and formed a reputation for intoxicating, otherworldly carnage - broken ribs, bloody microphones, shamanic ritual and even a ruptured spleen were part and parcel of their touring show - as well as a fierce loyalty to the DIY and grassroots venues and heroes they encountered. While the narrative and spiritual world of Opus Kink underwent constant evolution, the close relationships they fostered with underground music-world-denizens would inspire their philosophies and works along the way. Performances in Serbian abattoirs, stadium complexes in Istanbul, spur-of-the-moment DIY shows in Tyneside industrial estates and secret appearances crammed into the back of their local dive that quite literally brought the roof down - this adaptability and unconcern for career propriety carved out a place for Opus Kink in the hearts of rock’n’roll weirdos.
Thrown a bone by a major record label courting the band, they recorded the single ‘I Wanna Live With You’ (2024) with Dani Bennett-Spragg at HOXA in North London, who then passed on their other new demos to her longtime mentor and collaborator, Grammy Award-winning producer and mixer Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Florence & The Machine, Baxter Dury, REM, Kronos Quartet, Sam Fender). Silvey heard the potential for strange majesty in these recordings and drafted the band into Willesden Green’s notorious Fish Factory Studios for the first of many sessions laying down what would become debut album ‘The Sweet Goodbye’.
The Sweet Goodbye’ is an album about calling out from the stagnant, compromised conundrum of modern life, gyrating in the sucking mud and celebrating expression, pleasure and abandon in the face of the twenty-first century’s bland and violent trials. It’s a record about not turning away, taking horror in stride and seeking what lies on the other side of it. It’s art about art, art about nothingness, pop songs about love and fear and trying to build meaning from less than null. It’s a record of great ambition, troubled genesis and defiant strangeness that truly situates Opus Kink in a world of their own.
With their album finally hewn from solid ozone, tied in a bloody bow and ready to trot out on the world’s dingiest far-flung stages, Opus Kink stagger into the next era with their streaming eyes on the skies, presenting the new beginning of their ‘Sweet Goodbye’ and, as ever, inviting you to ‘taste the smell of love’…
