Nuclear Family Band Keep the Room in the Recording on a Father's Letter Called "Asshole"
A Margate Four-Piece of Family and Friends Opens Its 2024 Album with Its Most Exposed Song
A band whose guitarist is the songwriter’s sister makes a particular kind of room to record in. Add two friends on bass and drums, and that is the room Nuclear Family Band made asshole in. The song opens the Margate four-piece’s seven-track album of the same name. It came out on 27 August 2024, and it carries a message from a father to his children. The band softened neither the sentiment nor the title.
Nuclear Family Band sit in the playlist below, and asshole is the song that brought them to this desk. The Nuclear Family Band profile collects their coverage across the network. The album arrived here through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news titles. Hear it first, then read on.
Why Nuclear Family Band Called A Song To Their Sons What They Called It
The title is the first craft decision worth examining, because it is the one that costs something. A song addressed to your own children can take almost any name. This one puts a word on the sleeve that streaming services censor into asterisks. So every listing of the record carries a small act of self-editing the band never chose. Matthew Mole made the call anyway.
The lyric sits in the gap that choice opens. A parent is talking to his sons. The blunt title reads less as provocation than as an admission, the kind a parent makes when the honest version of the message includes their own failings. Where the song sits supports that reading. Track one, the first thing a listener hears, before the record has earned any goodwill. A band hedging would have buried it at six.
From Scanners To A Four-Piece Of Family And Friends In Margate
Mole is the songwriter behind the London band Scanners. That group spent the second half of the 2000s touring with Devo, The Charlatans, The Horrors and Silversun Pickups. Its song “Salvation” turned up in an episode of Gossip Girl. Scanners worked in a colder register, guitars pushed through synthesisers, more architecture than living room.
Nuclear Family Band is what happens when the same writer moves that furniture aside. He puts the family in the room instead. His sister Susie plays guitar. Alex plays bass. Matt plays drums. The name is not a joke about the ensemble; it describes it. The band work out of Margate, on the Kent coast, across acoustic rock, alt-rock pop and alt-country. In practice that means guitars and a voice carry the songs, rather than production.
There is a longer line behind the record, and the band have pointed at it themselves. Their Apple Music biography traces the earliest musical memory to a childhood car journey. Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond played through a long drive at night, with a father at the wheel. So a father writes to his sons, and his own first strong memory of music came from his father. The coincidence needs no explaining. It simply gives the piece a shape: something received, then passed on.
How The Album Is Built Around Its Opening Track
The other six tracks are Creatures in the Night, Animals, Let’s Make the Best of It We Can, Nuclear Family Man, Like Lovers and Just for a Day. Several had already appeared as standalone singles across 2023 and 2024. The album therefore collects material the band had road-tested one release at a time, rather than writing it in a single block.
That accounts for the sequencing. The newest and most exposed song opens, and the familiar ones follow. It is the opposite of the usual instinct, which leads with the proven one. Perhaps that was confidence. Perhaps it was the only order that made sense of the lyric. Either way, the record organises itself around that decision.
One more thing keeps the song from being merely a confessional, and it is the ensemble. A four-piece of relatives and friends records differently to a hired band. Nobody in that room has been paid to be tactful about a song like this one. That is usually audible.
From the AcousticMusic.News curator team: “The interesting decision is not the word in the title, it is putting the song first. Nuclear Family Band open with the most exposed thing they had, played by the people closest to the writer, and the record spends the next six tracks earning the right to have done that.”
Where To Follow Nuclear Family Band Across Streaming And Social
For listeners deciding whether this belongs in rotation, the band’s own stated reference points are useful and honest. Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty are the obvious lineage. Verses carry their own weight. Choruses arrive because the song has run out of other things to do. The modern half of the comparison is Mac DeMarco. That one is less about the sound than the register, a writer willing to be plain and a little unguarded on record. Between those poles is roughly where asshole lives.
Anyone who follows that line will recognise the terrain quickly. It is a record for listeners who prefer a song that states its business and stops.
You can hear the album on Spotify and on Apple Music. The band post videos on their YouTube channel. Finally, they keep up with releases on Instagram, Facebook and X.
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