If you’ve never heard The Tubs but are aware of their backstory, they may not be what you’re expecting. The Welsh four-piece formed in 2018 from the ashes of Joanna Gruesome, the incendiary noise-pop act active in the first half of the 2010s.

If you’re expecting similar levels of audio chaos from The Tubs, you’re in for a surprise. Hard Life is the band’s third album, and continues where 2025’s Cotton Crown left off – 12 tracks of folk-infused indie with some classic rock twists. Yet where Cotton Crown had a deep source of sadness running through it – written, as it was, on the back of a relationship break-up and a bereavement – there’s almost an exhilaration to much of Hard Life.

It’s a record of boundless energy, helped in no small part by the contributions of fiddle player Chris Haigh (whose CV rather incongruously includes the Steps number 5,6,7,8!). Haigh fits brilliantly into the band, with the opening title track being the perfect way to kick off the album – the violin works seamlessly into the song’s power pop.

Singer Owen Williams’ voice sounds uncannily like that of folk-rock legend Richard Thompson, and he injects a similar level of intensity and passion into his songs. The lyrics are often brutally self-deprecating, but even Stoop To Me, a song about the awkwardness and embarrassment of unrequited love, sounds like a ready-made radio staple.

Those lyrics, as Williams has explained, often read as an internal dialogue between two sides of his own persona. An early example of this is Who’s Gonna Love You Now?, which balances romantic dreams of living in the capital city with the harsh realities of everyday life (“So you’re saying I’m gonna move to London, well who’s gonna pay the rent?”). In a move that’s fast becoming a Tubs trademark, it’s a song delivered at a breathless pace with a chorus that sounds instantly memorable.

This knack of taking bleak, sad emotions and transforming them into fist-pumping anthems is one that’s pulled off time and time again on Hard Life. Now And Then is a gloriously jangly garage rocker about wistful regret, which Williams’ former Joanna Gruesome bandmate Lan McArdle lending guest vocals, while the blistering Heaven Or London brings to mind Hüsker Dü at times.

What’s clear, three albums into their career, is that The Tubs know how to write a hook. If You Don’t Love Me immediately sounds like an earworm, and the urgent Do Yourself A Favour, driven along magnificently by Haigh’s fiddle, is the sort of song you just want to listen to again as soon as it finishes. They only let the pace drop at the end, on closing track As Long As You Leave, a ghostly acoustic ballad from the point of a view of a woman putting up with a man who “whines about his scumbag dad”. It’s a starkly beautiful end to an album that confirms The Tubs as one of the country’s most essential bands.