Marmozets Return with ‘CO.WAR.DICE’ After an Eight-Year Absence

Eight years is a long time to leave a band hanging. Marmozets walked away in 2018 on the back of a well-received second album and then, for reasons both large and small, just stopped. Frontwoman Becca Bottomley became a mother, she and guitarist Jack Bottomley married, and a pandemic forced everyone to reassess. The world outside ticked rightward. The band’s new record stares straight at all of it and calls itself CO.WAR.DICE.

The title lands as a self-indictment. In the shadows of that hiatus, Bottomley found a generation of cowards and counted herself among them. This album is the sound of stepping back into the light. Recorded as a four-piece after the departure of drummer Josh Bottomley (Jack’s brother), the songs tighten the math-rock chaos that once defined them, pushing Becca’s snarling vocals to the front of a frantic, stop-start rhythm section. An assertive opening stretch of singles primes the return, but the album’s range quickly broadens.

‘Flowers’ works like the kind of soaring, ballad-adjacent rock moment the band has used well before, going back to ‘Captivate You’ and ‘Run With The Rhythm’. Elsewhere, things get stranger. ‘Dandy’, written almost a decade ago, strips the band down to a bare pulse. ‘Swear I’m Alive’ carries a gothic undercurrent rarely heard in their catalog. And then the title track arrives as a stadium-scaled indie-rock finale, the opposite of the claustrophobic density of old tracks like ‘New York’ or ‘Cut Back’. It is a song that opens its chest rather than closing ranks.

Marmozets emerge with a record that refuses to be polite about the time lost. A June UK tour, from Sheffield’s Foundry to London’s Scala, puts the songs into rooms built for reaction, not reflection. They are not easing back in. They are picking a fight with their own silence.