ALBUM RECOMMENDATIONS |

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The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Working for a Nuclear Free City

[#] Businessmen and Ghosts (2007)

Reviewed September 14, 2026

Segregated overload can't spoil a good thing.

Like all good British things, Working for a Nuclear Free City was bound to crash on American shores and be completely ignored, and their international debut Businessmen and Ghosts sweetens the deal with an entire second disc of new material. Sort of. Ghosts awkwardly scrambles the phenomenal running order of their self-titled across these two, the more beat-driven tracks landing mostly on the first disc and the atmospheric workouts mostly on the second. It makes the dry ice clouds feel just a tad too thick, the second disc more impenetrable than it needs to be, but I suppose it's all academic, really. All together, WFaNFC continue to cook up toweringly satisfying dystopian electro-rock.

For the new highlights, give the glimmering chug of "Kingdom", the echoing, wistful "Nancy Adam Susan", or the deadpan Stone Roses send-up "Donkey" a whiff. A few songs here go full Queens of the Shoegaze, as "Soft Touch" turns "In My Head" into wispy clouds and "All American Taste" hits you like a rain-soaked freight train. For fans of the slightly more pastoral, "Rocket" is liquored-up acoustic nihilism, and "England" sees the band ride their propulsive basslines down a country lane towards oblivion. The lopsided running order of Ghosts really doesn't do WFaNFC's greatest asset, distilling the dreamy and aggressive together, justice, but start with the self-titled and this can only be a giant second heaping of a good thing.