Other Half announce third album ‘Dark Ageism’ and share first track ‘Lifted Fingers’

Norwich-based noisemakers Other Half have announced their third album Dark Ageism, which arrives on June 21 via Big Scary Monsters.

The latest effort from the post-hardcore trio is described as the “culmination” of a trilogy that began with 2020’s Big Twenty on Venn Records and 2022’s Soft Action. According to an official release, it finds the band “negotiating what it means to be in their 30’s and still doing the same things they were doing as teenagers. Their own personal dark age, where the only things that seems to change is the price of a pint, and how much cosmic debt they’ve accrued over all the years of ruinous shit.”

The lead single ‘Lifted Fingers’ also arrives today and sees the trio teaming up with Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws.

“Nada Surf are one of our collective all-timers, and really formative to the music we play, so it means the absolute world that he also contributed some guest vocals here on Lifted Fingers, being the positive retort to all the doom-mongering I do in the first half of the song,” said vocalist Cal.

“I think at its heart, it’s a hopeful song, about finding connection amongst all the sludge. In Matthew’s own words, ‘people make stuff, you make your own stuff, and then sometimes you make stuff together. Here’s to making stuff.” 

“Lifted Fingers came about after a pretty hefty stint of listening to Blur; Soapy went to some of the reunion shows and it was near-impossible to escape Damon’s mockney lilt for a while before and after,” he added.

“Luckily, Blur are brilliant, especially I think some of the more Graham Coxon-heavy songs, so I sat about trying to write something like ‘You’re So Great’. We’d also been hammering a lot of Martin Newell/Cleaners From Venus and Pavement at the time, so I think the sickly-sweet stench of melody kept threatening to permeate our usually tuneless songwriting. In the end, Lifted Fingers became something I’d always dreamt of writing; a dark, spindly pop song that still sounds exactly like Other Half.” 

You can check out the track list in full below.

01 “Lifted Fingers”
02 “Strange Loop”
03 “Sucked It Sore”
04 “Lowlifes & Lower”
05 “Feeling For Yourself”
06 “Farm Games”
07 “Bumps In The Night”
08 “Dollar Sign Eyes”
09 “Rotator”
10 “A Little Less Than Evil”
11 “Pastoral Existence”
12 “Other Half Vs. The End of Everything”