Alternative
Wrong Speed Records · 25 September 2026
The title comes from the second track. “Beast” (4:37) opens on a biblical vision and works Dickens and pieces of British history into a reflection on the fascism that’s coming back; that’s where The Antigeist comes from, zeitgeist and poltergeist and Antichrist at once. It’s the kind of wordplay that could stay a joke, and doesn’t.
After Dead Centre (2024), which paired a hallucinatory novel with a single album-length instrumental, this is the most song-shaped thing the Farthing brothers have ever put their name to. There’s a lot more piano from Roo, and Tim sings a lot more, softly and melodically, rather than delivering the stark narration of the earlier material.
“Population 206” (4:18) is synth-pop with the energy drained out of it, deliberately, and it spins immigration myths out to a ridiculous conclusion. “Cramming” (5:28) builds on a bleeping pulse that keeps getting more insistent while the band does what it does best, which is sketch a scene out of questions nobody answers; in this case, the religious conversions of powerful men in trouble.
For the first time the Farthings drop the Operatives A and B pseudonyms and use their own names. Rob Ellis is on drums and Joe Thompson on bass, and the album was recorded with all four playing together in a single session before they spent a year reworking it.
Seven songs, none under 4:08 or over 5:28, thirty-three and a half minutes: a regularity so exact it ends up flattening a record that’s about very different things. And “America” (5:07) only glances at its subject, after six tracks that went at things head-on.
Seven tracks, thirty-three and a half minutes, Wrong Speed Records, 25 September. It’s Reigns’ eighth full-length since We Lowered a Microphone Into the Ground (2005). It closes on “America”, where the narrator folds his clothes under the pier and walks out into the sea.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre