Tugboat Captain

South London's Tugboat Captain have spent nine years in restless evolution, from scratchy lo-fi home recordings to baroque-pop ambition to something warmer and harder to contain. Formed nearly a decade ago, the band began as a loose-knit group of friends piecing together melancholy, hook-laden songs. From that original lineup, only frontman Sox and bassist Josh Cobb remain. Together they now run Ctrl P, the recording studio that has become both the band's headquarters and creative anchor. Across their catalogue, a revolving cast of collaborators drop in on a wide array of instruments, forming a ragtag living-room orchestra central to the band's identity. Sharp pop hooks buried under strings and communal chaos: it's a sound that has earned them the enduring "baroque pop" tag. Their 2025 album Dog Tale, written and recorded in a single week at Ctrl P, was their most cohesive and fully realised record to date. A rough-hewn yet tender song cycle about love, home, and dogs, it felt like the record they had always been building towards. New album All At Once finds them locked in as a five-piece, pushing further than ever before. Sweeping strings give way to jagged synths as Sox tumbles from one moment of chaos to the next. It is an album about disintegration and liminality, volatile and anxious in tone, and at the same time the one that sounds most unmistakably like them.