When it is hard to know what you will miss until it’s already gone, Biffy Clyro empower us to be present with their new album, Futique, out this month and a UK tour set for January 2026.
Biffy Clyro – Futique
Release Date: Out Now
Words: Matt Pratt
As you would expect from any band in their 30th year of existence, Biffy Clyro are a far cry from the angsty youthful buccaneers who burst out of the Glasgow rock scene at the start of the millennium.
Eyebrows were certainly raised by the raw, and sometimes absurdist, band as they stepped into the spotlight with songs like 57, Toys, Toys, Toys, Choke, Toys, Toys, Toys, and There’s No Such Thing As A Jaggy Snake, but it was not until their third studio album that the band hit mainstream consciousness.
Thanks to the freedom afforded to the band following their slew of achievements, recent releases have seen a hybrid presentation of radio-worthy hits and avant-garde masterpieces. The sonic fluidity of one of the most prevalent rock bands of the mid-noughties makes them impossible to pin down and even harder to predict, making us wonder what their 2025 album, Futique, could possibly bring to the table.
Futique is a word that you will not find in any dictionary. It is a brand new creation straight from the brains of Kilmarnock’s favourite sons. It is a fusion of future and antique, to explain the sentiment of a moment or object that may seem ordinary or unprofound in the moment, but will one day be a valuable artefact to be pondered and studied.
The one thing that rarely declines with experience is technical aptitude, and Biffy Clyro’s studio recordings sound better than ever. Buttery basslines being pinned down by foot-tapable drums and tangy guitar licks are produced to perfection in tandem with Simon Neil’s iconic Scottish tones.
While the quality of sound is hard to argue with, the heavy music community may take umbrage at the stylistic choices of the band’s latest release.
On a scale of pop to Metal, Futique sits closer to Coldplay than to Megadeth, but not so much as to lose their riff-laden rock licks that have seen them appropriately headline Download Festival twice. Those yearning for the heavier side of the Biff’s catalogue may find some solace in songs such as Hunting Season, True Believer, and Friendshipping, complete with snarling basslines and snappy strings at a slalom’s pace.
As is common ground with Biffy Clyro’s work, the vivid rock beats are neatly balanced with emotional intimacy in tracks like Goodbye and Woe Is Me, Woe Is You. These songs resonate with the sentiment of the Futique title, detailing the everyday, survivable losses that we grit our teeth through on a regular basis rather than utter catastrophe.
Conversations of amicable separations and fighting for a love already lost give us the most vulnerable window into Neil’s life, not for the significance of what is shared but for the unremarkable nature of these feelings that largely go unspoken.
There is normally at least one song on every Biffy Clyro album that distorts your expectations. As we plow through the final track, Two People In Love, you would think you were listening to any usual three-and-a-half-minute radio play candidate.
It is as you come to what you would naturally assume would be the close of the song that things pick up, and your senses are clasped in the same way they were the first time you caught the outro to Fleetwood Mac and The Chain.
The final two minutes of this closing track transform what would have otherwise been a fairly underwhelming finish into an optimistic ascent deserving of a firework fanfare at the close of a festival.
Futique is a tightly packed sandwich of musical mastery and delicate introspection by a band from whom you would expect nothing less. An end-to-end committed listen enables you to truly appreciate the attention to detail and quality that the three-piece have pumped into this latest work of art.
With all this said, I find myself struggling to articulate what song I would go back to and play on repeat until I am sick of it. It seems a shame that an album of such overwhelming musical quality does not have the matched addictive quality that this band have become so adept at delivering.
With a huge UK tour set for early next year, attention will turn to how these new tracks are to be homogenised into a setlist already bursting at the seams with anthems spanning three magnificent decades of Biffy Clyro.
