Wire - Mind Hive

WIRE are the definitive post-punk group. Since their inception, they’ve built a reputation for creating music that stretches the rock form while simultaneously editing it down to its essence. With a gift for crafting songs that perfectly balance experimentation and accessibility, WIRE were recently hailed by The Quietus as "one of the most consistent British bands of all time." Yet they show little inclination to look back or trade on past glories, remaining resolutely focused on making music that is smart, vital, and defiantly modern.

Mind Hive is the band’s first newly recorded material since 2017’s stellar Silver/Lead, an album that garnered rave reviews (“Some of the best tunes they’ve done” – The Guardian) and career-best sales. And if Silver/Lead set the bar high, Mind Hive clears it with ease.

Album opener “Be Like Them” is a super-angular composition, built around a recently rediscovered lyric from 1977. Colin Newman and Matthew Simms’ guitars constantly mesh and diverge, while Graham Lewis and Robert Grey drive the track forward with unstoppable menace.

In contrast, lead cut “Cactused” is the first of Mind Hive’s pop moments. Newman’s vocal is wide-eyed and wired, while Lewis’ smooth backing vocals add depth. Simms’ effects-heavy guitar work forms a bright web of noise, and the song’s stop/start dynamics deliver a series of precise energy bursts.

“Primed and Ready” rides a tightly pulsing synth sequence punctuated by icy slivers of guitar. Grey drives whole sections of the song using only hi-hat, before snapping back with crackling snare hits that push the track with even more intensity. This is WIRE at their most compressed and propulsive.

“Off the Beach” is another standout pop song. With its breezy, optimistic melody and a blend of electric and acoustic guitars, it seems to celebrate everyday life—until, in typical WIRE fashion, things begin to tilt into something more surreal.

The sun-drenched shimmer of “Unrepentant” sees the band exploring a bucolic soundscape that early Pink Floyd would have been proud of. One of the album’s finest lyrical moments, it radiates into a shimmering sonic heat haze.

The atmospheric yet concise “Shadows” pulls off a classic WIRE trick—pairing a dark, brutal lyric with a tender musical setting. Never has the recounting of atrocity sounded so seductively pitched.

Muscular and dramatic, “Oklahoma” is the joker in the pack. Opening with the line “I love your sexy hearse,” Lewis’ vocal winds through a dense compound of guitar textures and synth tones, building into a masterclass in tension and release.

The album’s centerpiece, “Hung,” is an eight-minute journey that matches a brief but evocative lyric with a dense, mesmeric guitar grind. Simms and Newman’s keyboards lend a plaintive undercurrent, as the song moves through shifting sections, each with its own atmosphere.

The album closes with the stunning “Humming,” a beatless, autumnal drift of delicate keyboard textures and soaring guitar tones. Newman delivers a “state of the world” lyric with quiet innocence, while Lewis ends the track with a husky baritone list of places and their troubled associations—an elegiac conclusion to a supremely confident record.

WIRE’s back catalogue is, of course, filled with epoch-defining, influential works. Their groundbreaking first three albums—Pink Flag, Chairs Missing, and 154—were reissued last year to wide acclaim, landing among the top reissues of 2018 (Rolling Stone No. 10, Uncut No. 12, Select No. 3). Now, Mind Hive arrives as WIRE are being cited once again as a major influence by a new generation of bands. They’re also the subject of an upcoming career-spanning documentary, People in a Film, set for release in late 2020.

How a band this deep into their career continues to produce such urgent, inventive work remains a mystery—but here we are. Mind Hive is the most masterful 35 minutes of post-punk you’ll hear this year.