Swansea Sound – Mean To Be Mean (Skep Wax)
With their third album on the way in November 2026 Swansea Sound has shared single Mean To Be Mean, taking on a ’90s music journalist nemesis
Artist: Swansea Sound
Track: Mean To Be Mean
Label: Skep Wax
Released: 1 September 2026
Find it: YouTube
You can’t go wrong with some Swansea Sound and new single Mean To Be Mean both heralds their third long player Pre-Post-Truth coming in November and settles a score with a ’90s nemesis in the delightfully witty and jangling way you’d expect.
An upbeat put-down the track has great back and forth vocals between Amelia Fletcher and Hue Williams as they play out the parts of themselves and the unnamed mean music journalist respectively. While bouncing along melodically, lyrically it surfaces how music journalism so often landed in straight-out sexist and petty criticism, than any kind of cultural critique.
The band said of the track, “Mean To Be Mean reminds us, it wasn’t that great in the past: a world dominated by well-paid opinion-formers, mostly male, who had the power to police our culture.”
‘You said girls could not be punks / let me off please, I was drunk / you said we should all fuck off / I was only trying to keep my job’
An indiepop supergroup Swansea Sound is Hue Williams (The Pooh Sticks), Amelia Fletcher and Rob Pursey (Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, The Catenary Wires), Bob Collins (The Dentists, The Treasures of Mexico), and Ian Button (Death in Vegas, Louis Philippe, Pete Astor, and Papernut Cambridge).
With Mean To Be Mean we get the best of that indiepop pedigree, and a definitive show that bearing a grudge and winning out long-term aren’t mutually exclusive. The rock writer may well be unnamed here, but is just as likely forgotten (while being simultaneously memorialised as a bellend – marvellous stuff!). Snide quips and cheap sexist asides may have contributed to that week’s sales of NME or Melody Maker but it is the music which endures, and holds the real meaning for people.
News of the forthcoming album is much welcomed and is bound to contain more serious topics delivered in a witty, often self-effacing loud pop style.
Mean To Be Mean by Swansea Sound is out digitally now. Third album Pre-Post-Truth is set for release on vinyl, CD and digital via Skep Wax on 13 November 2026.
Live dates:
- 13 November – The Piper, St Leonards
- 14 November – Music Hall, Ramsgate
- 15 November – Rough Trade East, London (album launch show)
- 19 November – The Cavern, Exeter
- 20 November – The Louisiana, Bristol
- 21 November – Just Dropped In, Coventry
- 27 November – Sidney + Matilda, Sheffield
- 28 November – Kamera, Manchester
- 29 November – Esquires, Bedford
- 3 December – Oxford
- 4 December – Le Pub, Newport
- 5 December – Tangled Parrot, Newport (daytime show)
- 5 December – Bunkhouse, Newport (evening show)
- 12 December – The Lexington, London
- 18 December – The Oast, Rainham
- 8 January – Glad Cafe, Glasgow
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Sarah Lay
A long-standing music journalist she's also co-founder of independent record label Reckless Yes, an author of novels, and when not messing around with words and music, a digital strategist.
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