Armoured Man. “Hind Legs” Review
Armoured Man “Hind Legs”
Release Date December 2025
Over a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, and seventy odd years into the game, where do multi-instrumentalist, acoustic duo Armoured Man fit into the byzantine cross pollinations of popular musical genres? Alt-Folk? Trad Alt-Rock, Celtic Post- Hardcore- Folk-Rock Fusion? (just made that one up) A problem for Spotify, I think.
Regardless of genre, Adam Thomas and Lewis Berale, with the release of their second Album “Hind Legs” have created an edgy but contrarywise beautifully melodic and expertly crafted set of songs that will (siren like) lull you into a false sense of security and wellbeing. If you don't listen to the lyrics that is. Crisply mastered by Frank Turner, tracks which include “Hands, “Churches”, Swim” “Fathers”, and “Lightning Bolt” explore themes of “climate breakdown, geological time, faith, fatherhood, and a deeply uncertain future”. Lighten up boys you might say. But someone has to say this stuff. Anyway, as dear, dear, Joni once sang “There’s comfort in melancholy”
So, five stars (which you will have to visualise as I don’t know how to generate them)
The Velvet Curtain
January 2026
Teaser track below:
Holland On Sea
Holland On Sea -Armoured Man
View lyrics
At first light I could not be certain
what was lying there, like a fallen curtain
a phantom in folds on the sand
something from the hereafter
a spacecraft returning to land
Then through haze of the morning
the stumbling shadows, the silver sun warming
the warp and the weft of the skies
the weight of the questions
the lessening light in your eyes
And the people gathered round
waiting for the story to be told
of sails and shipwrecks and sunsets
all bloody with gold
The dreams that were inside your head
ancestors, ambergris, candles by beds
fortunes for greasing the cogs
for lighting the lamps
and the fires that fuelled the fog
you followed the tide to the shore
bubbles and blubber and foam on the floor
fleeing the slapping of oars
beaten and battered and knackered
it’s not what your body was made for
And the people gathered round
waiting for the story to be told
but the song that you sung
was too long, too low and too old
Rampaging ripples of sound
the thrum of the engine, the gathering cloud
clusters of clicks in the waves
you remember the murder, the mayhem
the watery graves
A mountain of muscle and mind
a current of consciousness stretching through time
you outlived the gods and the ghosts
to find yourself baffled and beached
on the Anglian coast
And the people gathered round
waiting for the story to be told
but the song that you sung
was too long, too low and too old
The people all waited
for what the wake would unveil
gathered to fathom the fluke and the fate
of the whale