The Tubs' second album, Cotton Crown, sees the Celtic Jangle boyband venture into darker, more personal territory while continuing to hone their highly addictive brand of songcraft. It’s a true level up album which sees the band expand their sonic palette to take in a kaleidoscopic range of influences: everything from soulful pub rock (Chain Reaction) to Husker Du aggression (One More Day) to melancholy sophisto-pop (Narcissist) gets a look in. As Pitchfork noted, The Tubs see jangle as a ‘vast world of moods and muses’ and Cotton Crown sees them continuing to explore this world and creating a distinctly Tub-ular sound in the process. 

This is in no small part down to Owen ‘O’ Williams’ vocal performance- often compared to a young Richard Thomson- and his frank, bleakly funny lyric writing. Cotton Crown sees him delve further into his favorite themes of love-psychosis, unsympathetic mentally ill behavior, and the humiliations of being a musician in London. This time around, however, there’s a palpable sense of risk in his self assessments/confessions. No more so in the track’s closing track Strange- an accounting of the clumsy, intrusive, well-meaning social interactions that took place in the period following the suicide of his mother (the folk singer Charlotte Greig.) As Williams says: “I’d tried a few times to write a song about it. The result had always seemed either mawkish, simplifying or like I was hawking my trauma. But then this one came out, and it felt right because it looked at something smaller: the weird, unsatisfying, strangely funny ways everyone, including myself, acted after the dust settled.” The album artwork features an image of Williams as an infant being breastfed by Greig in a graveyard- a promotional shot taken around the release of her debut album (the re-issue of which was featured in The Guardian in 2023.)