One Rizla

Shame arrive in a clatter of barely-controlled energy, the guitars scraping and jabbing rather than strumming, the rhythm section pushing forward like a crowd that won't stop moving. There's a breathlessness to it — the tempo refuses to let you settle, Charlie Steen's voice already cracking slightly under the pressure of its own intensity. He sings with a South London rawness that feels both theatrical and entirely genuine, working-class swagger filtered through art school anxiety. The lyrical territory is young men in pubs and on street corners, the petty rituals of that particular world — a rizla passed between hands as shorthand for belonging, for boredom, for the specific texture of that social moment. Post-punk is where "Songs of Praise" lives, but the energy draws equally from pub rock and the Clash's street-level urgency. This is a song for sweaty venues at eleven PM, for the moment a crowd stops watching a band and starts becoming part of it. There's something almost anthropological about how precisely Shame capture that scene without distancing themselves from it — they're not observing it, they're inside it, reeking of cigarette smoke and conviction.