Opus Kink - The Sweet Goodbye Review
The infamous Brighton sextet finally release their highly anticipated debut album. A culmination of their ferocious jazz-punk sound, it’s worth the near-decade long wait.
An album from Opus Kink has been many an underground music fan’s white whale for years now. Breaking out of Brighton in 2017, a string of shamanistic live shows immediately branded them as ‘ones to watch’ from the get go. Sprawling their danceable invective over a host of grassroots venues, their ranks brimmed with a supernova of talent; like some downsized Chelsea Hotel, poets, painters, label managers and teachers have taken residency within the group at some point or another.
A one-two punch of EPs – 2022’s ‘Til The Stream Runs Dry and the following year’s My Eyes, Brother! – only whetted appetites further. But, such a febrile spread of intra-band hobbies was destined to rebound eventually. The growth of saxophonist Jed Morgan’s label Hideous Mink and trumpeter Jack Banjo Courtney stints for huge names like Olivia Dean and Gregory Porter sent them spiralling in separate directions. Not to mention (deep breath): frontman Angus Rogers juggling a poetry career and Peckham pub domination; rhythm section brothers Sam and Fin Abbo’s transition to music teaching; as well as brilliantly-named keyboardist Jazz Pope run as a delivery driver. The stars seemed measurably unaligned for a full-length to take shape.
Whilst some of the individual songs that would eventually slot into The Sweet Goodbye gestated over frequent touring – the one constant of life in the Kink it seems – putting them to wax ended up taking around two years, wherein the Sisyphean stone that was an inaugural LP started to roll a little quicker. Standalone single ‘I Wanna Live With You’ fired the starting gun proper in 2024. Despite being absent from the album’s eventual tracklist, producer Dani Bennett-Spring (who helmed those sessions) ended up forwarding a set of the band’s new demos to her Grammy-winning production guru Craig Silvey.
So enamoured was he with their clammy grooves and untapped imperious aura, he ushered them to Fish Factory Studios to carve out arguably the band’s definitive sound – presently, at least. Together, they’ve slashed these sloshed missives with vintage drum machines, pushed popping horn and keyboard riffs redolent of Ethio-Jazz and foregrounded the tight percussion in all its bony glory. Puritans may decry the slightly clearer mixing in comparison to something like honking early b-side ‘Mosquito’, true. Yet it’s hard to deny that the higher production value hasn’t only grown the scale of each song, but also made each layer more perceptible; integral when presented with an arsenal of instruments all prepared to outskronk each other.
Our first real morsel of the album crash-landed in the opening throes of October 2025, the demented surf-punk of ‘I’m A Pretty Showboy’ a reassurance that their grimy stock-in-trade wasn’t to be cast out entirely. Writhing through a muddy motorik groove, it hiccups to a close propelled by the group’s trademark droning folk harmonies. Lyrically, it echoes this convergence of the sacred and profane as Angus Rogers invokes Jesus with all the loose-screw fervour of the most convincing televangelists.
Of course, religion is no estranged subject to Opus Kink. Indeed, they’ve been crowing about repentance and Jerusalem jezebels since their first EPs. Here, though, the instrumentals also exude the Dark-Age ecclesiastics retold above them. ‘The Head Tree’ sounds as if Earth, Wind & Fire were backed by a Gregorian choir on ‘Boogie Wonderland’ instead of The Emotions, courtesy of a tart synth bassline and a star turn from Brighton’s finest folk-punkers The New Eves. Meanwhile, ‘Crucify!’ slips effortlessly into a simulacrum of Jesus rock era Bob Dylan in its back half, chants of “crucify me now!” riding warm organ tones and a transcendent trumpet solo to build to the album’s most cathartic moments.
Always a guiding light to their compositions, the brass is arguably the standout feature of this project. Relentlessly dynamic, Jack Banjo Courtney and Jed Morgans’ can coax both heaviness and beauty from their respective weapons of choice. Closer ‘Oh, Irony’ is lopsidedly elegiac, its sobering pleas of acquiescence buoyed by the pair’s drunken, yet sympathetic, interjections. ‘Peckham Nocturne’ actually leaves the horns to do the talking for most of the runtime, muted trumpet serenading across a bizarro fusion of last-orders balladry and library music kitsch. On the flipside, ‘448C (The Colour of Love)’ and ‘Come Over, Do Me Wrong’ revel in chaos, replacing the guitar nearly entirely with brash reedy riffs that dance among the Abbo twins’ formidable rhythm section.
There’s nary a dud in sight: even the more Kink-by-numbers pieces like the title track and ‘Will It Come For You?’ have enough apocalyptic twists to prevent them from fading into the background. The Sweet Goodbye, then, is a rare thing indeed: a debut album that has outlasted and bested the hype, to truly sensational results.