Legss – ‘Unreal’ album review: An intriguing post-punk score of disorientia
There’s a sensation that Liverpool-London quartet Legss captures on debut album Unreal with eerie and uncanny command.
Chiefly, the disorienting and confounding fog triggered in the brain when society is moving at such a choking, hectic pace that time slows around you, the full weight of everyday banality pulling your senses to a standstill. The disquieting churn that hovers over the contemporary rot as we all navigate 2020s’ perma-stasis has been scooped up in Legss’ post-rock languor, conjuring an amorphous haze of smoky jazz splashes and acerbic garage attack.
Like shadowy vapours, Legss’ nebulous arrangements radiate spectrally around frontman Ned Green’s dual passionate yet nonchalant vocal croons. This post-punk shroud serves its apt title succintly, a pervading unreality born not from fantastic galumphs into escapist retreat, but dwelling in a realm of seething micommunication and taut alienation with such focused fervour the frissons and embers of surreality start to sprout from underneath mundanity’s floorboards.
It takes several songs to arrive at such captivating planes. For whatever reason, opening numbers ‘Broadcast’, ‘Gloss’, and ‘Sleepers, Awake’ swirl listlessly with a lack of direction, but about thirdway in Unreal’s prickly subtlety begins to rear its head. As Legss’ debut unfolds like a fever dream, Green’s fleeting lyrical daydreams and knotty, internal monologues start to infectiously worm their way deeper into your psyche, jabbing your mind like a gnawing imp reminding you that “yes, you are just as troubled by it all as we are”.
“It all” refers to surviving London, although it could be any one of the UK cities. While avoiding too facile or glib a reference to Mark Fisher’s cultural critique or the throes of late-stage capitalism—the band namechecked in the late K-punk blogger’s Ghosts Of My Life afterword—Legss certainly scores a dour and confusing end times that soaks up a particular slice of paralysing dread only breathed in the capital. It’s impossible to listen to Unreal’s finale ‘909’, before the exquisite and stirring instrumental coda ‘Fugue’, without internally shuffling past a million Tesco Expresses flanked by furiously hoisted St George’s Flags while Green spews a tangled litany of social grievances and impotent rages.
Not that Unreal is a bleak and draining listen. Leggs are able to whip up passionate frenzy when the moment calls for it, just as easily as rippling pools of discoloured, ruminative beauty. Despite moments of unfocused fug, Leggs has dreamed up an intriguing art-punk statement of introspective bite, a record that looks out the window to the grey, drizzly malaise outside the pub window, attempting to distract from your existential blues by offering to get the next round in.
Defining track: ‘Bit Rot’
For fans of: Chancing for a pint well after last orders in an empty pub with all the stools on the tables.
A concluding comment from the imp: “Buy our merch!”
Release date: September 12th, 2025 | Producer: Balázs Altsach and Louis Grace | Label: The state51 Conspiracy
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