With their ever-mutating brand of jazz-and-country-laced punk, Opus Kink have always cut a singular figure in a saturated landscape. Making their name with incendiary, cult-like live shows, the band – formed in Brighton (UK) in 2017 – have developed a sound as elusive as it is recognisable. Underscored by a formidable horn section and ragged, sardonic delivery, the band bear passing resemblance to post-punk and no-wave acts like The Pop Group, Birthday Party and Lounge Lizards, but it’s the weaving of older, more traditional influences – choral, folk, country, Latin, Weimar cabaret, cruise-ship-crooning – into the fabric of their music that sets them apart. Through their songs concerning violence, evil, shame, troubled sexual politics, anxiety and emptiness, all served with a wry absurdist bent, Opus Kink craft an alluring nether-world for their voracious audiences to plunge into.
Formed with brief and outrageous aspirations as a jazz group, Opus Kink (at the time yet to recruit genuine jazzer Jack Banjo Courtney) swiftly realised that their faux-bebop-funk mess wasn’t fooling anyone and naturalised into a kind of rock-and-roll smorgasbord that instantly drew rabid fandom following their debut show in 2018. Angus Rogers, a poet and painter drifting from job to job after finishing university edged into the orbit of musically synergised brothers Sam & Fin Abbo (bass and drums) and young smasher of the keys Jazz Pope in the wake of their old band’s breakup. After a few addled jam-sessions they convinced themselves that anxiety, existentialist philosophy, punk, jazz, folk, dance, Latin and Eastern-European music could be fused to devastating effect and decided to bring saxophonist Jed Morgans down with them upon meeting him in the bowels of a long Brighton night. Eventually they found their foil in Jack Banjo Courtney’s biblical trumpet chops and the complete lineup set about hefting that ill-advised sonic destiny.
They tore through the UK and Europe in the early years of the group and formed a reputation for intoxicating, otherworldly carnage – broken ribs, bloody microphones, shamanic ritual and even a ruptured spleen were part and parcel of their touring show – as well as a fierce loyalty to the DIY and grassroots venues and heroes they encountered. While the narrative and spiritual world of Opus Kink underwent constant evolution, the close relationships they fostered with underground music-world-denizens would inspire their philosophies and works along the way. Saxophone player Jed Morgans’ homegrown record label Hideous Mink would go on to release far more than the band’s own oeuvre, signing and championing emerging artists and culminating most recently in a colossal vinyl compilation release in aid of the Music Venue Trust (September 2025). Performances in Serbian abattoirs, stadium complexes in Istanbul, spur-of-the-moment DIY shows in Tyneside industrial estates and secret appearances crammed into the back of their local dive that quite literally brought the roof down – this adaptability and unconcern for career propriety carved out a place for Opus Kink in the hearts of rock’n’roll weirdos.
A host of single releases and two EPs later (’Til The Stream Runs Dry [2021] and My Eyes, Brother! [2022]) the group were cemented as a heady and unpredictable force in UK music culture – but with Jed working as a DIY label boss as well as in the offices of other record companies, Jack touring the world as the most sought-after trumpeter in Christendom, brothers Sam (bass) and Fin Abbo (drums) teaching music, Jazz Pope (keys) working as a delivery driver and frontman Angus Rogers in pubs and bookshops around Peckham whilst publishing books of poetry, not to mention each member’s solo musical output and gigs, finding time to record in an independent band proved a chaotic and frantically piecemeal process and seven years into the band’s existence a full-formed debut album was not forthcoming.
Thrown a bone by a major record label courting the band, they recorded the single ‘I Wanna Live With You’ (2024) with Dani Bennett-Spragg at HOXA in North London, who then passed on their other new demos to her longtime mentor and collaborator, Grammy Award-winning producer and mixer Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Florence & The Machine, Baxter Dury, REM, Kronos Quartet, Sam Fender). Silvey heard the potential for strange majesty in these recordings and drafted the band into Willesden Green’s
notorious Fish Factory Studios for the first of many sessions laying down what would become debut album ‘The Sweet Goodbye’. His vision to distill and hone the band’s ragged sonic edges entailed long hours sweating over repetitive grooves and stripping back songs to their grisly skeletons. His introduction of vintage drum machines and a (relatively) cleaner, slicker production style gave birth to a new sound which the band christened ‘witch disco’ or ‘chainsaw pop’ depending on the mood of the session. From the driving, swampy rock of ‘Come Over, Do Me Wrong’ with its Ethio-jazz inspired horn riff to the cowboy guitars and Soviet waltz of ‘The Sweet Goodbye’, the bounding, wonky pop of ‘Will It Come For You?’ to the out-and-out dancehall hook and Dylanesque outro of ‘Crucify!’ Opus Kink’s manic absorption of influence shines through the discipline of the album’s new-yet-ancient sound. Each member’s essential contribution is paraded in glory here – Rogers’ dark lyrical deftness and vocal dexterity, Morgans’ louche, growling saxophone, Courtney’s freak-jazz prowess and soulful horn arrangements, Pope’s alien, drugged-out dance-synths and the Abbos’ low-slung, snaking juggernaut of a rhythm section leer glistening from every track.
‘The Sweet Goodbye’ is an album about calling out from the stagnant, compromised conundrum of modern life, gyrating in the sucking mud and celebrating expression, pleasure and abandon in the face of the twenty-first century’s bland and violent trials. It’s a record about not turning away, taking horror in stride and seeking what lies on the other side of it. It’s art about art, art about nothingness, pop songs about love and fear and trying to build meaning from less than null. It’s a record of great ambition, troubled genesis and defiant strangeness that truly situates Opus Kink in a world of their own.
With their album finally hewn from solid ozone, tied in a bloody bow and ready to trot out on the world’s dingiest far-flung stages, Opus Kink stagger into the next era with their streaming eyes on the skies, presenting the new beginning of their ‘Sweet Goodbye’ and, as ever, inviting you to ‘taste the smell of love’…
SHORTER BIO
With their ever-mutating brand of jazz-and-country-laced punk, Opus Kink have always cut a singular figure in a saturated landscape. Making their name with incendiary, cult-like live shows, the band – formed in Brighton (UK) in 2017 – have developed a sound as elusive as it is recognisable. Underscored by a formidable horn section and ragged, sardonic delivery, the band bear passing resemblance to post-punk and no-wave acts like The Pop Group, Birthday Party and Lounge Lizards, but it’s the weaving of older, more traditional influences – choral, folk, country, Latin, Weimar cabaret, cruise-ship-crooning – into the fabric of their music that sets them apart. Through their songs concerning violence, evil, shame, troubled sexual politics, anxiety and emptiness, all served with a wry absurdist bent, Opus Kink craft an alluring nether-world for their voracious audiences to plunge into.
They tore through the UK and Europe in the early years of the group and formed a reputation for intoxicating, otherworldly carnage – broken ribs, bloody microphones, shamanic ritual and even a ruptured spleen were part and parcel of their touring show – as well as a fierce loyalty to the DIY and grassroots venues and heroes they encountered. While the narrative and spiritual world of Opus Kink underwent constant evolution, the close relationships they fostered with underground music-world-denizens would inspire their philosophies and works along the way. Performances in Serbian abattoirs, stadium complexes in Istanbul, spur-of-the-moment DIY shows in Tyneside industrial estates and secret appearances crammed into the back of their local dive that quite literally brought the roof down – this adaptability and unconcern for career propriety carved out a place for Opus Kink in the hearts of rock’n’roll weirdos.
Thrown a bone by a major record label courting the band, they recorded the single ‘I Wanna Live With You’ (2024) with Dani Bennett-Spragg at HOXA in North London, who then passed on their other new demos to her longtime mentor and collaborator, Grammy Award-winning producer and mixer Craig Silvey (Arcade Fire, Florence & The Machine, Baxter Dury, REM, Kronos Quartet, Sam Fender). Silvey heard the potential for strange majesty in these recordings and drafted the band into Willesden Green’s notorious Fish Factory Studios for the first of many sessions laying down what would become debut album ‘The Sweet Goodbye’.
The Sweet Goodbye’ is an album about calling out from the stagnant, compromised conundrum of modern life, gyrating in the sucking mud and celebrating expression, pleasure and abandon in the face of the twenty-first century’s bland and violent trials. It’s a record about not turning away, taking horror in stride and seeking what lies on the other side of it. It’s art about art, art about nothingness, pop songs about love and fear and trying to build meaning from less than null. It’s a record of great ambition, troubled genesis and defiant strangeness that truly situates Opus Kink in a world of their own.
With their album finally hewn from solid ozone, tied in a bloody bow and ready to trot out on the world’s dingiest far-flung stages, Opus Kink stagger into the next era with their streaming eyes on the skies, presenting the new beginning of their ‘Sweet Goodbye’ and, as ever, inviting you to ‘taste the smell of love’…
