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Embrace Day-Glo Mayhem with The Nightingales' "The Divorce That Never Was" Video

Their new EP 'Become Not Becoming' is out today.

In 2009, Robert Lloyd, the bellicose frontman of post-punk legends The Nightingales, wrote a guide to solitary drinking for The Quietus. It was intentionally antagonistic, brutal, and troublingly beautiful. "Being able to lose it with nobody else knowing or caring is a fundamentally good and useful thing," he wrote there.

The Nightingales' unexpected renaissance over the last half-decade has been loosely based on taking this benevolent hostility public again. Regarded as one of post-punk's most important bands through the 1980s, "the misfits' misfits" according to author John Robb, they seemed to be the sum of their legacy by the early 2000s, their 20-year hiatus seemingly permanent.

They returned with the bit between their teeth in 2006 with Out of True. But The Nightingales we have now coalesced on 2012's, No Love Lost, a record that opened with Lloyd growling a capella, "I was as dry as a dead nun's cunt in the desert." It served as the wind-up before a perverted blues-heavy romp through Lloyd's mind and British culture. 2014's For Fuck's Sake and the following year's Mind Over Matter bound the refreshed line-up together—ex-Violet Violet drummer Fliss Kitson and Faust bassist Andreas Schmid are now one of the most formidable rhythm sections anywhere in the world—and Lloyd continued to snarl with intent.

Today, the quartet released Become Not Becoming, a six-track EP that you can order on ten-inch vinyl right here. It's a sharp, acerbic hit of inventive rock 'n' roll, the band's first with Damo Suzuki's James "Bo" Smith on guitar. The video for "The Divorce That Never Was," premiering on Noisey today, is a day-glo tribute to glam rock absurdity, directed by GobTV's Nick Small, and it drives at the grinning mayhem that Become Not Becoming creates.

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