Arab Strap: Half-Told Tales is the loudest they have ever been

Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton have spent thirty years making other people's bad nights into songs worth keeping. Half-Told Tales, released 4 September, is the tenth Arab Strap album and the widest one yet: fourteen narratives across four sides of vinyl, drum machines and saxophone and disco where once there was a room and a bottle. The voice has not softened; the music around it has grown.

Moffat and Middleton met in Falkirk, started working together in 1995, and put out The Week Never Starts Round Here the following year. Philophobia and the records that followed mapped post-Thatcherite Britain in Scots, sordid and specific and unembarrassed, and then the band stopped in 2006. They reformed in 2016, signed to Rock Action Records in 2020, and released As Days Get Dark in 2021 and I'm totally fine with it don't give a fuck anymore in 2024. Both albums made the same argument: the worse the world gets, the sharper this band sounds. Half-Told Tales is that argument at full extension.

Paul Savage recorded and mixed it, Sam John mastered it, and it arrives on Rock Action with Chem19 also on the sleeve. Fourteen tracks, fourteen stories, each one detailed enough to embarrass a short story writer. Nothing about the method has changed; everything about the scale has.

The arrangements reach further than anything else in the band's career, and most of the record moves. 'You You You' is the commanding one: an eighties synth arpeggio riding a drum machine that hits like a snapped cable, a fuzzed bass riff doing the rest, and a lyric that goes straight at the news. I fear for my son, I feel for my daughter / they're in this world of slaughter. It is the least comfortable thing here and the hardest to stop replaying.

'Be A Man' takes on social media, the manosphere, and the business of raising a son in the middle of it, and it is the softest track on the record, a mellow mood carried by saxophone where a guitar riff would usually sit. 'Glamour Magick' goes after the anti-ageing trade: I got big fat lips from a back street surgeon / then I bathed in the blood of a thousand virgins / it takes years off me. The haze over it is nocturnal, and the melodic writing is the most elegant on the album, closer to Solange than to anything rock-adjacent.

'Under Offer' is the one that hurts. It walks through a family home that is on the market, notices that they ripped out the bespoke couch where we used to play the SNES, and closes on the line that it's like they sanded away its soul. A piano melody drifts in from somewhere far off, electronic textures scatter underneath, and the whole thing is over before you have decided how you feel about it. Around it, 'Basic Physics' stamps and throbs, 'Fighting For You' gets its lift from an acoustic guitar built to start a march, 'Sunsong' slides into suave Roxy Music disco, and 'Ampersand' is a slow burner that pays out late. 'Gape' opens the record's ugliest vein with He examines his excretions, the brown piss and yellow shit, and Moffat delivers it the way he delivers everything, flat and certain.

It is for anyone who stayed with the band through the reunion, and for anyone who arrived on As Days Get Dark and wants the same dread with a floor under it. The Roxy Music comparison 'Sunsong' invites is the one that holds. Dropkick Murphys is not: Arab Strap's rebellion stays quiet even when the drums are loud. Play it in a dark kitchen at the end of a long week, or don't play it at all.

Fourteen stories over four sides is a lot of the same weather. By the final third the register starts to flatten, because everything here is squalor or decay or dread, and revulsion delivered often enough stops registering as a shock. 'Gape' is where it tips: the disgust arrives as a punchline, where the better songs get there through detail, through a couch and a games console and a sanded-down soul. Two tracks fewer and the case would land even harder.

The complaint is surplus, not quality. Half-Told Tales is the most ambitious record Moffat and Middleton have made, and it arrives thirty years in, which should not be possible. Four and a half: the extra length costs it, and the writing buys it back. Nobody else is setting this world down on record with this much precision and this little self-pity.

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