Interview by Jyla
“Let me know if it gets too windy!” Charlie Steen laughs as we begin our call. He’s sitting in a park under a bright London sky, his baritone voice carrying easily through the gusts. Steen, frontman of the UK band Shame, has just returned from Dublin after a string of summer shows testing out songs from their forthcoming album Cutthroat.
“I’m really excited. I can’t wait,” he tells me. “It’s weird—we’ve never released in the summer before. Everyone’s at the pub, everyone’s away, and I almost forget it’s coming out.”
That excitement has been building since the release of three music videos—“Cutthroat,” “Quiet Life,” and “Spartak.” Each one captures Shame’s raw and restless energy, marking a shift from the introspection of Drunk Tank Pink (2021) and Food For Worms (2023) back toward the brash urgency of their debut, Songs of Praise (2018).
“I think every band wants a new chapter with each record,” Steen explains. “With Cutthroat it feels unapologetic. It’s faster, louder, more direct. The last two were internal, but this one is full of characters and commentary—more like our first album.”
Joining our conversation, bassist Josh Finerty nods in agreement. “Even when writing Food For Worms, we were saying, ‘We need faster songs.’ It’s easy to slip into mid-tempo or sad stuff, but we wanted energy, something fun to play and fun to hear. I think we achieved that here.”
The result is a record that rarely slows down. From blistering tracks like “Nothing Better” and “Screwdriver” to the spoken-word fury of “Cowards Around,” the album feels built for the stage. Steen lights up at the thought of performing it live: “We always used to close with ‘Gold Hole.’ Now we’ve got ‘Cutthroat.’ It’s going to be fun building setlists again.”
Much of that urgency comes from working with producer John Congleton, known for his no-nonsense approach. “We’d play him a demo, and he’d say, ‘I don’t like that bit,’” Steen recalls. “Then we’d spend an hour tweaking, do three takes, and that was it. Very natural, very direct.” Finerty adds, “We’re five people with strong opinions. Sometimes you need someone to make the final call. John became that sixth voice we actually wanted.”
For Steen, the creative process was also new. Instead of arriving with finished lyrics, he wrote everything during recording sessions in Brighton. “It sounds risky, but it worked. John would ask, ‘What’s the identity of the song?’ and I’d just follow a line or character. Once I had that, it flowed.”
Characters are central to Cutthroat. The title track introduces a brazen figure declaring, “Take what you want, when you want it.” On “Plaster,” Steen sings of betrayal with chilling indifference: “You might as well take what you want.” The swaggering “After Party” revels in hedonism, while “Axis of Evil” sketches an elitist stitched in Savile Row who manipulates power with impunity.
So are these characters villains, heroes, or both? Steen prefers ambiguity. “I’m interested in paradoxes,” he says, citing a recent fascination with Oscar Wilde. “I don’t want to moralize or stay in an echo chamber. The world feels cutthroat right now—people taking what they want, cruelty being the point. These songs reflect that.”
For a band that has played more than 660 shows since forming in 2014, the live energy of Cutthroat feels like both a return and a renewal. “It’s confident,” Steen says simply. “It sounds like us at full force.”
And with a grin, he adds, “I just can’t wait for people to hear it loud.”
English