Black Honey
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Indie rock quartet from Brighton are back with their fourth album, Soak.
Unapologetically led from the gut, it’s stronger for its vulnerability while leading the charge on wild dynamic shifts from the gothic, to the psychedelic and achingly tender – all presided over by Black Honey’s frontwoman and force of nature Izzy B. Phillips. To celebrate, they will be kicking off their tour throughout August across the UK, with an album release party at Signature Brew Blackhorse Road in London.
After their previous records have drawn from the cinematic worlds of Quentin Tarantino (Black Honey, Written & Directed) and Wes Anderson (Fistful of Peaches), Soak – their fourth – is decidedly Kubrickian. Steeped in retrofuturism, unsettling geometry and eyeballs forced to bear witness to the uncomfortable and necessary.
For this album, Phillips is prizing intention and emotional resonance above technical perfection – and ‘Shallow’ rides the knife’s edge of both. Experimenting with a new, stream-of-consciousness writing style, the polemical tone of the previous albums is overridden by diving into grey areas and complexity. Her lyrics, exalted by the band, have never been so brilliantly acerbic.
Speaking on the vision for the album, Phillips shares: “Soak is me processing a decade of touring and creating music and art as an addict. It’s me picking at the layers of messy, romantic, confusing, woozy, beautiful and fucked up things. Who I thought I was, who I was supposed to be and who looks back at me now are all so different but I’m kind of here for it.”
It follows on from their era-announcing single ‘Psycho’ – Black Honey at their finest; twisting a melodic pop hook into an unnerving, rock-driven distortion of itself. The video depicts Phillips trapped in a dystopian facility where prisoners are controlled through an endless flood of artificial realities. Strapped into a chair, her mind is force-fed fabricated experiences until she becomes numb. Similar to our digital lives in 2025, then. As the cycle repeats, she escapes, discovering a control hub – a miniature model of reality. She rips out its wires, breaking free from the system. Is it possible to escape the trappings of our own dark realities as easily?
Another taste arrived in the form of ‘Dead’, an anthem of dissociation with gloriously scuzzy, do-your-worst chorus taunts. Her storytelling takes on a newfound sharpness – quite literally. ‘Dead’ evokes the visceral eyeball torture of A Clockwork Orange: “And you couldn’t decide to stab my back or my eyes / Oh no, I know what you like / Just press on the knife”. This honesty is equally unflinching with ‘Shallow’, crowd-pleasing to the ears but merciless in its lyrics.
And then, of course, there is the glowering, gothic brilliance of ‘Insulin’ – another dimension to a band who continue to reinvent themselves four albums deep. The track explores harrowing lived experiences of sexual assault, but written in an instinctive, free-form style. Indeed, the phrase, “You’re fucking with my insulin,” was merely a placeholder initially. It was only later that Phillips realised how perfect a metaphor the hormone provided with the way it can be ruled by emotional dysregulation.
Black Honey are an independent British rock band who over the last near-decade have increasingly made major moves with their last two albums bothering the UK Top 10 (#7 and #6 respectively). A melting pot of alt-rock and dark-pop – they have cut through the noise with every release, defiantly forging their own path with each record and exhilarating sold out crowds all over the world. Their eponymous debut album was released in 2018, Written & Directed followed in 2021 with their last album A Fistful of Peaches landing in 2023.
A new chapter in the unfolding Black Honey saga is upon us – we’re in for one hell of a ride. See full touring details below:
