Dublin alt-rock sextet THUMPER have returned with the mesmerising ten-minute tour-de-force ‘Middle Management’. It’s a track so grand in scale that it would only make sense to be ten minutes long. Walls of crunchy distorted guitars collide above an insistent krautrock drum pattern, with the band’s layers of vocal harmonies being pushed further and further back by the exponentially growing textural intensity that leads towards its eventual climax. “The song itself is an outlier on the album. Every other song coming in at around the 4-minute mark, 'Middle Management' is a clean 10 minutes long. The vocal hook ‘I thought that I could change, I thought that you could too’ repeated into abstraction as it becomes unclear if the narrator has any intention of changing at all.” The band have announced the impending release of their new album, Sleeping With The Light On. -Dan Peeke