“Let me know if it gets too windy!” says shame’s Charlie Steen, sitting in a park under a blue London sky on a fine late afternoon in August. “Are you hearing me okay?” Some gusts have kicked up during our hour-plus Zoom conversation, and there’s not much other than Mother Nature that could interfere with the booming baritone of one of modern rock’s most captivating frontmen. Whether he’s speaking, singing or a combination of the two – a frequent approach in shame songs – Steen is nearly always able to cut through, usually in a wry and engaging way.

He’s got his bags outside with him. The band has just gotten back from Dublin, where they played the latest in a series of one-off summer dates that have allowed shame to get their live legs back in form and to road test songs from the main event: this Friday’s release of their lean and mean fourth album, a return to rowdy form called Cutthroat. Suffice to say, Steen is stoked for the world to hear it. “I am really excited,” he says. “I can’t fucking wait. It’s weird though – you know we’ve never released in the summer before, so it feels really strange. We’ve been so busy and there’s so much going on, and you know, we’ll go on holiday, or our mates will go on holiday, everyone’s at the pub or everyone’s out, so I almost kind of forget that it’s coming out?”

There have been periodic reminders of the album’s imminent release since June, with the unveiling of three music videos: the wild, whirling dervish of “Cutthroat,” with Steen spinning on a bike around a “wall of death” velodrome shouting, “Motherfucker! I was born to die!”; an equally frenetic scene in “Quiet Life,” as the band plays in an abandoned office building while a working crew proceeds to create mayhem; and the recent “Spartak,” directed with panache by Steen himself, in which the steely-eyed singer, in a rumpled suit, takes a next-morning stroll through the streets of the capital. The trifecta also signaled a shift for shame, away from the more insular stance of their last two records, 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink and 2023’s Food For Worms, and a return to some of the brash abandon that marked their 2018 bow, Songs Of Praise, still for my money one of the great debut records of the 20th century.

“I think every musician, or every band, want sort of a new chapter when they do a record,” Steen offers. “And I think with this one – it probably only matters to us – but it’s the first time we’ve done a one-word album name. Everything before was three words. And coming out in the summer, I do think a lot of the songs on there are quite summery?” By which, he means fun, but as ever with shame, fun comes with sharp elbows. While that one-word title, Cutthroat, never actually appears in the song of the same name, it’s a spot-on encapsulation of the album’s hit-it-and-quit-it energy, and the rapier wit Steen brings to his lyrics.

“I think the word “cutthroat” just gets straight to the point,” he says. “It’s quite an unapologetic word, and I think the album just sort of sounds like that! I was just with Steve Lamacq, the Radio 6 DJ and journalist, and he said, ‘I think it sounds the most confident.’ And I think it does have that. I’m just excited to play it. Yeah, the last two albums were a bit more internal. And this one is – a large part of it is about characters and social commentary, stuff like that. A bit more like the first album.”

We’re joined on the call 15 minutes in by Josh Finerty, shame’s bassist and co-founder and Steen’s friend since childhood. “John! It’s been a long time!” Finerty greets me. “Dardy Bar in Brooklyn in 2018, was it?” referring to a well-attended shame afterparty in my hometown. I’ve actually known the South Londoners since November of 2017, on their first trip to New York, as they crashed into the city, an irresistibly ramshackle look-what-the-cat-dragged-in-from-Blighty outfit.

Steen, Finerty and bandmates Eddie Green, Sean Coyle-Smith, and Charlie Forbes played two shows, did – yes – some partying, and I interviewed them, mainly about the upcoming Songs Of Praise and its unskippable essentials, including the glowering “Concrete” and the soaring “One Rizla,” a song that is incapable of getting old. The debut was followed by the COVID-era Drunk Tank Pink – completed before the pandemic hit, but with a theme of learning to live with oneself that was eerily prescient – and Food For Worms, which paired shame with the legendary producer Flood. Each record in its own way was tremendous, and forged new musical ground for the band. What the latter two weren’t was necessarily immediate, simple, or fast.

For a band that has played live as relentlessly as shame – more than 660 shows since their inception in 2014, if setlist.fm is to be believed – sometimes immediacy counts. When compiling a setlist for the Food For Worms tour, the band often had to turn to its first record, just to get the tempo up, so going into Cutthroat, the fellas had a need for speed. “I think even when we were writing Food For Worms, even at that point we were saying, ‘We need to write more fast songs,'” recalls Finerty. “Cause I think that it’s kind of quite easy to default to writing sad songs. Or mid-tempo, things that are a bit slower. I think sometimes you have to — at least, in our case, we have to push ourselves to write things that are more energetic? And have that sort of party feel and are actually fun to play, and fun to listen to? And I think we achieved it on this record.”

Certainly. The album puts pedal to the metal and rarely lets up, from the driving “Nothing Better” and “Screwdriver” to a blistering, spoken-word “Cowards Around” to that ripsnorter of an opening title track, which has given Steen a new option for a live set closer. “We were always ending on ‘Gold Hole,’ from the first album,” he explains. “We’ve been ending on that for a long time, and now we have “Cutthroat.” Now we have all these – when I look at this album, as we get closer to releasing it, I just can’t wait to do a set list with this. There’s so much fun you can have with it.”

Much of the credit for Cutthroat’s directness has to do with the man behind the board for the project, John Congleton, one of the century’s most accomplished indie rock producers and a no-nonsense (if slightly less caustic) descendant of the late, great Steve Albini. Of Congleton’s bulging discography (he’s produced works by Angel Olsen, the Mountain Goats, St. Vincent, the War On Drugs, and hundreds more), one that especially interested Steen was a more recent release: Mannequin Pussy’s 2024 I Got Heaven.

“I just think it’s such a heavy-hitting album, and I guess it’s kind of a similar ethos to what this record has,” he explains. “Quite direct and to the point. It just sounds loud and in-your-face, not over-produced. Which is quite nice. And that’s something that a few people have said, who we work with, about this record, is that it doesn’t sound overworked in the production.”

“To the point” is, it seems, a fair description of Congleton’s style. “The way John would do it is, we’d go in, play and him the demo,” says Steen. “And he might be, “I don’t like that bit, I don’t like that bit.” And then we’d go into the live room and fiddle around with it for an hour, maybe? And then we’d do three takes, and that was it. It was all just quite natural.” If working with Flood in 2022 was more like being with, according to Steen, “a drama teacher,” with sessions lasting well into the night, Congleton, who adheres to a strict daytime recording schedule, was more no-nonsense. Finerty says shame needed that. “We’re a very democratic band of five people who, for our own sanity, try and not tread on each other’s toes too much?” he explains. “And so I think we were all kind of in agreement, like, ‘We kind of want a dictator.’ in a sense. Like we wanted someone to be that sixth opinion, and even though it is subjective, it’s nice to have a sort of overruling subjective opinion. Like, ‘Either you change this song, or we don’t do it, cause I don’t really like it.’ But it was in a way that we really liked!”

It may be Steen whose approach was most different on Cutthroat. For the first time, he did all his lyric writing while recording, ensconced at Salvation Studios in cold and rainy Brighton on England’s south coast last December. Waiting and hoping that the words will come might sound a risky proposition when you’re on the clock, but for Steen it worked. “John would ask, ‘What is the identity of the song?’ And for me it’s very important to have like a sketch, or a direction,” he explains. “Just something to be like, what is the character? Or the emotion? And it just flows.” One such idea anchors the tunefully bold “Spartak”: “You’re no better than me!” Steen croons, as the rest of the song’s reflections on a judgy relationship build from that. “With all of the songs, I can kind of just remember, ‘Okay, this one lyric sums up the song,'” he says, adding, “Well you’re a journalist, you know what I mean, it’s like the headline!”

So let me – 13 grafs in – propose another headline to sum up Cutthroat’s personality: It’s an electrifying record on which morality is not necessarily clear-cut. Steen, by virtue of being a kid in school who was more interested in literature and drama than math or football, has long had a talent for evoking characters in songs, either first-person or via trenchantly observational third, and he’s never worked that muscle more than on the new LP. The characters on Cutthroat are mostly scoundrels. There’s the boorish lead on the title track, declaring, “Do what you wanna do/ Why not?/ Take what you want/ When you want it.” On the Anora-inspired “Plaster,” Steen addresses a woman who “fucked your boyfriend’s best friend, just to see who felt better” before later concluding, “I don’t mind” and, “You might as well take what you want.” The bright hedonism of “After Party” opens with “I want it all/ I want it now” and later evokes rubber gloves and a leather whip, while the remarkably electronic closer “Axis Of Evil” tells of an elitist “stitched up by Savile Row” who “wants to be the king” and “will get away with whatever you do.”

It’s unclear, at times, whether Steen is indicting or celebrating these zero-sum self-servers. They certainly seem contemporary enough. These are, after all, cutthroat times in which increasingly might makes right and cruelty is the point. “Take what you want” is obviously the ethos in Washington, DC, but also in too many parts of the world, and Charlie Steen is far too smart and too real to deny that backdrop. But he’s also not interested in easy moralizing, or, he says, “living in an echo chamber.” In the run-up to Cutthroat’s release he has cited reading Lady Windemere’s Fan and other Oscar Wilde works as fueling an interest in “paradoxes.”

“I started thinking about what an interesting subject that is,” he recalls. “In books and stuff, you have, like, the gangster that goes to church, or the socialist, you know, who does coke and eats McDonald’s! [Laughs.] You have these sort of people, everyone knows them, and everyone in themselves is a bit contradictory. You are presented with a character who is flawed, and in good shows, with good writing, good films, you empathize with them. And it might be because they are doing it to protect their family, so you can empathize with that, or maybe just, ‘Well, I’m no saint, as well.’ I’m just not interested – at least at this moment – in the good or the bad. I’m interested in the in-between. And so a lot of the record is, ‘Don’t be so judgmental.’ But then a lot of the record is quite judgmental!”

Why yes, it is. While Steen sings, “Don’t get onto your high horse,” in “Spartak”, in “Nothing Better” he’s doing just that: coming for the do-nothings, the flâneurs of the world who spend all their time “moaning and complaining” and end up being “shit craic” down at the pub. And no one is spared on “Cowards Around,” on which Steen channels some of the Fall’s Mark E. Smith (and even “nicks,” by his own admission, a phrase from the band’s 1980 tune “The N.W.R.A”). Steen identifies a litany of “cowards” in the lyric, including politicians, real estate agents, “people who make protein shakes,” and “news presenters live on TV.” He chuckles when I remind him that I was once one of the latter. “It’s just such a fun word to say [‘coward’],” he says. “And I just like the idea of taking everyone down. You know what I mean? And sort of no one is safe.”

Including himself. It wouldn’t be a shame record without a little self-deprecation from Steen. The man who sang on “One Rizla,” “I’m not much to look at, and I ain’t much to hear,” is back in form on the bouncing “To And Fro.” Over a Strokes-y crunch, he asserts: “I ain’t got a good voice, but it don’t mean I don’t mean what I say in a song.” A distinctive frontman has been key to so many rock bands emerging in the past 15 years, and there is only one Grian Chatten, Brendan Yates, Joe Talbot, Cameron Winter and Dara Kiely. But for pure can’t-look-away, in-your-face, shout-y charisma, equal parts theatrical, cocky, goofy and everyman-sexy, Steen is in a class by himself. A lot of that comes from still having the “cool kids” from his school days residing rent-free in part of his head: the ones who tried to make him feel less than when he was a self-described “chubby teenager who liked the wrong music and wore the wrong clothes.” These days, he’s more likely to tell off “those who would make someone feel shitty for not fitting in” than take shots at himself. “Instead of ‘poor me,’ this record is more a ‘fuck you,'” he says, adding that it’s a big part of why he wanted Cutthroat to feel defiant and celebratory: “Sometimes it takes a bit of anger to stand up for yourself.”

He’s in a good place. His IG features a tanned Steen on holiday, or showing off his paintings. He’s taken up running, and earlier this year even ran in a half marathon. If that sounds like no big deal, know that when I first met Charlie Steen, he seemed more interested in marathons of the nighttime variety. Perhaps sensing how impressed I was at this evolution, he laughs. “I did do a half marathon, and I just really sort of enjoyed it!” he says. “It was a fun sort of challenge to do. There have been a few new challenges. When I was in school I was usually like, ‘Art, drama, English, history, great’ – and then – ‘fuck everything else.’ Because I wasn’t naturally good at them. Including, not naturally good at running. And I’ve been learning Portuguese as well, because my girlfriend is Brazilian. And I’m not naturally good at languages.”

Which brings us to “Lampião” – a darkly jaunty ode to the notorious early 20th century Brazilian bandit of the same name, and certifiably the most bananas song shame have ever released. It appears a little more than halfway through Cutthroat, and it opens with Steen singing, in Portuguese, “Acorda Maria Bonita,” a popular folk song about Lampião, before launching into a swaggering “tall tale” voice to recount the story of the “big bad Brazilian motherfucker” who terrorized the northeastern part of the country in the 1920’s but to this day retains a sort of mythic status not unlike our own Jesse James. Of all the rascals on Cutthroat, Lampião is the realest. Steen learned about him from his girlfriend’s mom, while visiting São Paulo.

“The thing that appealed to me is that in a country that is pretty much the size of Europe? That everyone knew him!” he explains, with a laugh. “He is pretty much embedded in the culture. And when I came back home, no one seemed to know Lampião. So I think, in the age of information, I found it very – it’s like, you know sometimes when you hear a song and you hear about a band through word of mouth, and you don’t look them up. And it gives you that old school feeling? And it was kind of the same thing, where I was being exposed to him by stories, instead of by Wikipedia. I just found it all very interesting, and that’s why I wanted to tell it in that folk story way.” On a record with some unexpected musical turns – “Axis of Evil” is giving shame-meets-New Order, while “Quiet Life” goes rockabilly – “Lampião” takes the prize as a jaw-dropper.

Steen has to bounce from our call – he has a dentist appointment to get to – so I continue on with Finerty, about how this band is different from the quintet I first met in 2017, three years after its formation. Turns out, Steen isn’t the only one who’s toned down his partying ways. “I think we’re very different people,” Finerty concedes. “I mean, at the core we’re the same, but it’s like, we’ve gone through a pandemic and 11 years of touring together and survived that? I think we’ve definitely chilled it out. I mean, you hung out with us at the time, you know. I think maybe the pandemic taught us to chill out a bit. You know, it can make you a bit insular, in some ways? But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it probably would have just happened naturally, from getting older. But I know we’re certainly like – I mean, I’m not a big drinker, I think I’ve definitely changed a lot. But then I look at everyone else and I’m like, ‘You haven’t changed one bit!'” [Laughs.]

What’s not changing is shame as road warriors. If the current setlist.fm tally is accurate – and if we discount 2020, which for most touring artists was a wash — it works out to more than 60 shows a year, though there have been years when shame have done well over 100. And lately, Finerty says it’s been light. “By shame standards, it feels like we’ve done no shows over the past two years!” he jokes. That will change soon enough – beginning in late September they’re booked out for five months across Europe and North America. “I think we are all similarly excited to tour again, this time,” he says. “We’ve all had a good amount of time taking it a little bit easier, or writing and recording. And also, it’s our livelihood, so we’re ready to sacrifice ourselves for a few months [laughs] to help pay the bills, or something? Not that we’re not doing it for the love of it, but you know, it’s important.”

The grind of the road has helped them learn to not burn the party candle as much, as has, just maybe, the fact that at the moment all of the guys are in relationships. “I don’t know if that’s calmed us down though,” Finerty demurs. “I think it’s mostly just changing, and getting older and knowing what you enjoy. You just find other things. And our partners come with us sometimes as well, so that’s nice, it means we get to travel together and stuff” So – no parties when we reconvene in January, in Brooklyn, then, Josh? He laughs: “Oh no, we’ll see. We’ll see, John. We’ll have a new, special brand of sort of shame mid-level rager!”

Mostly, with Cutthroat, Finerty and the rest of the band are ready to breathe a new dose of exhilaration and fun back to fans living through what for many might feel like pretty dystopian times. “I hope people can find a bit of an outlet in it?” he says. “I know for sure that we’re doing that. And that’s probably why we are trying to push ourselves to write things that do feel a bit more optimistic, or energetic. Cause it’s like – you can use that energy to push back as well. I think we are trying to use that energy to do both things – to help ourselves feel a bit more optimistic, and also to energize people to let out your rage, or whatever is pent-up, about how things are”

And as for the irrepressible Charlie Steen? The wild-eyed one who in the “Cutthroat” video, when not manically zooming around a wall of death in a shirtless priest’s get-up is dancing in nothing but sparkly gold short shorts – first introduced at Glastonbury 2023 – that leave little to the imagination? (Finerty: “We were like, ‘Maybe we could cool it on the crotch shots?’ and it was like, ‘Well, you know, we’re up against the clock!'”) Steen hopes the takeaway is something he continues to live by: Do what you want to do.

“Things are so shit, and so dark, and there’s this kind of disdain,” he says. “And I think that a lot of people are being told what they can’t do, or what they can’t accomplish, or who they can’t be. And that can be as simple as a lack of funding in schools, for arts departments or drama departments, and people becoming sort of ashamed to pursue certain things. You know, we started with that kind of ethos, that it wasn’t cool. And that we weren’t the cool kids, it wasn’t the popular thing to be doing what we were, sort of embracing insecurities in a band environment, where you feel your insecurities are sort of celebrated. And you feel joy in that. So I think a lot of the themes on the record are kind of talking about that, do you know what I mean? Love who you wanna love, be who you wanna be. You know, that, in itself: passion as an act of rebellion.”

Cutthroat is out now via Dead Oceans.