Ugly confirm plans for debut album, The South Facade

The South Facade follows the London band's debut EP Twice Around The Sun released in 2024, and was first previewed with "Marina" just a few weeks ago. The album was written across three years, with early sessions taking place during retreats in a converted barn while the songs would take greater shape across rehearsal rooms, bedrooms, studios and stages. The album was recorded in Wales and ultimately completed in London with producer Balázs Altsach, who also produced, engineered and mixed Twice Around The Sun.

Speaking about The South Facade, Ugly explain: “This LP exists partly as a continuation of the experiments in communal songwriting that inspired our previous EP. The question was, and still is: can we construct complete songs, as a group, from a point of blank conception (in other words, without individual preparation). This is by no means a novel approach, but what one often finds in taking this road — and we have encountered it time and again in our own work — is that the music will tend towards certain habitual outcomes."

"If you begin with a purely improvised jam, you are likely to end up developing compact riff-based loops without much harmonic diversity or progression; the resulting ‘song’ is then most easily structured by the adding or subtracting of instruments or voices, the stitching together of disparate loops, or by the flow of collective dynamics," they continue. "The more people in the band, the harder it becomes to reject this way of doing things. (And six people, as all of us grimly agreed on one particularly vexing day, were perhaps too many.)”

The South Facade artwork

The South Facade tracklist

"Wasteland"
"Marina"
"Die Another Day"
"Nat Cora & The Nations"
"In Samphedoo"
"Gavement"
"The South Facade"
"Gallowine"
"Orance"