Oral Habit have today dropped their new single and video titled ‘Surface Breaker’, from their upcoming album ‘A Broken Chord’, releasing June 12th via Krautpop! Records.
If you were hoping Oral Habit would suddenly discover restraint, ‘Surface Breaker’ is here to politely laugh in your face. The Brighton psych punk duo have built their reputation on volume, chaos, and a kind of feral DIY energy, and this track leans all the way in. It’s less a gentle introduction to their upcoming album A Broken Chord and more like getting shoved into the deep end while the band cranks the amps just to see what happens. Spoiler, it works.
From the first few seconds, ‘Surface Breaker’ feels like it’s already halfway through a meltdown. The guitars snarl and scrape with that fuzzy, overdriven texture the band thrives on, while the rhythm section barrels forward like it forgot brakes were even an option. There’s a hypnotic repetition underneath it all, a nod to their krautrock and garage roots, but it’s constantly being roughed up by jagged edges and sudden bursts of noise. It’s messy in the way great indie rock often is, meaning it sounds alive rather than polished into oblivion.
Vocally, the track walks that perfect line between unhinged and intentional. There’s a looseness to the delivery that makes it feel like it could fall apart at any second, yet it never quite does. Instead, it feeds into the song’s tension, turning each shouted line into another percussive element rather than just something to sing along to. It’s the kind of performance that would feel ridiculous if it weren’t so committed, but commitment has never been an issue for this band.
What really sells ‘Surface Breaker’ is its refusal to settle. Just when you think you’ve locked into the groove, it shifts, bends, or straight up detonates into another section that feels equally chaotic but somehow still cohesive. That constant push and pull keeps the track from becoming just another noisy garage jam. It feels intentional, like the band knows exactly how far they can stretch things before snapping them back into place, even if they pretend otherwise.
As a preview of A Broken Chord, this track suggests the album won’t be chasing trends or smoothing out rough edges for broader appeal. Good. Indie rock has enough polite background music already. ‘Surface Breaker’ is loud, twitchy, and just self aware enough to avoid collapsing under its own noise. If this is the tone they’re setting for the full release, expect something that hits hard, leaves a mark, and probably annoys at least a few people along the way, which is usually a sign they’re doing it right.
About Oral Habit & ‘Surface Breaker’
A self-described “Rainbow of Oral Habit”, the trio show us almost everything they’re capable of on ‘A Broken Chord’. Founded by Charlie Hales (guitar), his brother Felix (drums), and Tippi Lewis (bass), the band’s dextrous, fuzz-drenched garage rock – cut in the heat of live takes, or with “weirdo psych studio trickery” – stands as an aural battle with the delicious unreliability of the vintage technologies at their disposal. Listening to ‘ A Broken Chord’ you can almost sense the searing heat of amp valves, guitars wailing to within an inch of their strung-out lives. As Charlie himself says, “if a button’s there, it’s there to be pushed.”
New single ‘Surface Breaker’ is a whistlestop tour of their urgent sonic intentions. As twitchy guitar rifts shoot off into lysergic, mirror-warped breakdowns, the track epitomizes a record loaded with sprawling, yet tight compositions, packed with jolting tempo shifts and canny leftfield turns.
Complete with an animated music video by Idris Needle, and recorded with Harry Hayes and Rory Lethbridge of labelmates School Disco, speaking about the single, Charlie says: “Drunken crooning trips and breaks through the surface, a machine gun of snare hits and slipping sludge riffs. Before you can hold it in your hands it’s already slipped through your fingertips.”
Celebrating their album release with a nationwide headline run this June, Oral Habit continue to build on a busy live schedule in 2026, which already has seen them sell-out headline shows in Brighton and London, and tour the UK with Hot Face in January.
Following on from last summer’s Garage Frock EP, press/radio support is growing. Featured in The Guardian last autumn, the band have garnered airplay from BBC 6Music (New Music Fix, Amy Lame), Radio X (John Kennedy), as well as backing from the likes of Rough Trade, The Line of Best Fit, DIY, Pretty Green, Moof, Clunk, Still Listening, CREEM, When The Horn Blows, Hard of Hearing, Indie Is Not A Genre, and more
Featured image by Laurence Underwood.
LINKS:
https://oralhabit.co.uk/
https://www.instagram.com/oral.habit
https://oralhabit.bandcamp.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@oralhabit