Les Savy Fav at Brudenell Social Club

After more than a decade since Les Savy Fav last put out a record, the New York art-punks returned swinging last year. Oui, LSF – their first album since 2010’s Root for Ruin – rode on everything the band are loved for: chaotic DIY spirit, absurdist humour, and a joyous kind of rage.

The Les Savy Fav lore is already cemented: five Rhode Island School of Design pals who’ve spent 30 years blurring the line between performance art and punk show. The centre of the storm is the shirt-shredding, crowd-invading Tim Harrington who, in the words of Pitchfork, “ sacrifices safety and dignity alike for the sake of an unforgettable spectacle”.

Through the late ’90s and 2000s, Les Savy Fav carved a cult reputation with records like Go Forth and Let’s Stay Friends – wiry, sharp-edged takes on post-hardcore that carried enough anthemic punch to peak above the underground. Root for Ruin (2010) cemented their status, even as their shows grew more notorious than the records themselves.

Written and recorded in Harrington’s attic, through a heap of DIY and esoteric gear, 2024’s Oui, LSF is the sound of release following 14 years of silence; “no map, no preconceptions, no self-righteous certainty,” in Butler’s words. Its 14 short, sharp tracks offer up a mix of tragedy and comedy, studded with nods to the band’s eclectic musical tastes, from post-hardcore fury to mid-’00s dance-punk.

Butler describes ‘Guzzle Blood’ – the first single and opening track – as being dropped “into the bottom of a dark well. In a lot of ways the rest of the record is about the things we do to climb back out.” It opens with siren-like synths and Harrington howling about demons in your sleep and searching for a saviour, setting the tone in pure disillusionment, frustration and anguish – against which the rest of the album thrashes its way towards release.

By the time we get to ‘Legendary Trippers’, we’re nearly there – swaggering guitars, fidgety rhythms, euphoric melodies, with lyrics landing between uppercrust and dumb drunk. “The guitars have this offhanded virtuoso thing going”, says Harringoton. “Seth had stacked all of these semi-improvised scratch tracks into a demo. When I got them, I was immediately drawn to the manic pile-up of using them all, all at once, with zero edits. It’s like if the solo from ‘Taxman’ wolfed down a bottle of Adderall.”

The final track, ‘World Got Great’, is a spiky, guitar-driven anthem that lands like a final moment of unguarded optimism. Harrington’s lyrics – “We were there when the world got great / we helped to make it that way” – feel like a tentative manifesto for rebuilding, paired with a video in which world-ending monsters are defeated by tickle fights and bubble machines.

On stage, of course, is where Les Savy Fav come into their own. NME recently called their set “basically a party, full of joyous grooves and wild antics”, and the last time they played Brudenell, The Yorkshire Post described the evening as “exhilarating breach of personal space”. You’ve been warned.