No Limits: Haggard Cat On 'The Pain That Orbits Life' And Their First Headline Tour in Five Years
Wednesday, 13 May 2026
Written by Laura Johnson
Photo: Ruena
What do a broken collarbone, COVID-19 and a grimy recording studio have in common? The answer is that they all delayed Haggard Cat’s third album, ‘The Pain That Orbits Life’, which was recently released in a flurry of noise after a long wait.
The heavy alt-rock duo from Nottingham had already begun writing their fourth LP when their third, ‘Common Sense Holiday’, came out in 2020. “We had a series of bad luck,” explains singer-guitarist Matt Reynolds, prior to the band’s headline set at Cardiff’s Noizzefest. “We were originally planning to record this in 2023 and then you [indicates drummer Tom Marsh] came off your bike. That took us out for six months, because it was such a bad injury for someone so active to have.”
But even with a global pandemic and Tom’s recovery out of the way, it was not smooth sailing. “I think we had some stuff booked and we were not quite there, basically,” Matt says with a shrug. They made the tough decision to stop gigging, “be a bit more healthy about it” and write without any distractions or timescales.
With the how out of the way, they had to decide on the where. They opted for a warehouse on farm land that the owner had converted into a recording studio and practice space for his son, but as time went on they began to get sick from the dust coating the place. They realised they were in trouble, again. “It completely screwed my voice — we were tasting dust all the time,” recalls Matt. After the two weeks they had set aside to complete the record — “in one go, because that’s how we work,” says Tom — they had no vocal tracks. “It was so stressful,” Matt admits.
Thankfully a white knight arrived in the form of double Grammy Award-winning producer Adrian Bushby, who not only lent Matt all the equipment needed to professionally record vocals at the band’s rehearsal lock-up, but also referred him to a great ENT specialist. “It worked out,” beams Tom. “We could never have done it that way in the shed. Without that situation it wouldn’t have happened. I’m glad it happened. And now that place doesn’t exist anymore, they destroyed it!”
Despite Bushby’s first email leading Haggard Cat to think they were being catfished, his work on their ‘Cheer Up’ EP and ‘The Pain That Orbits Life’ has led the duo to label him “the only person that has understood our band [other than other players].” He was able to capture the pair’s raucous live energy, even while they explored options only the studio could offer: 12 vocal tracks, four-part harmonies, synths, guest vocals from Pieter-Paul Devos (formerly of Raketkanon, now of No Prisoners) and “a few ‘what the fuck?’ experimentation moments” including the rarely utilised bass guitar.
“We’ve always tried to replicate me and Tom on records before and that’s quite limiting, and intentionally it was limiting,” says Matt. “But with this we kind of went, ‘We’ve done that for a few records, what if we just wrote something and kept putting everything on it that we wanted to be there? We can complete the songs and write these big, full, layered versions of what we had in our heads. So that’s where the bass came in.”
As their recording process has changed, so too has Matt’s approach to lyrics, becoming less observational and more personal. “I think if you look back to the last album we were largely commenting on what was happening around us,” he says. “It was quite political for a lot of it. That was a representation of what was going on in the world at the time. But with this one, because of the amount of time we’ve had to live with it, rather than us looking outward commenting, we’re looking in. It’s very much about our own growth, how far we’ve come and our own experience to get to where we are now.
“The whole idea was to take the start of the record and for you to be in one terrible place that you need to get out of and by the end of it to be optimistic, looking forward. For it to be this journey of the different stages of getting yourself out of that hole and putting yourself more into an open space where you’re like, ‘I can continue, I can do this.’ Conceptually, that’s the narrative arc it takes throughout.”
Though previously apprehensive to write about himself, Matt has overcome that fear with age, going as far as to touch on the relationship with his stoic “coal miner dad” on the song Apnoea and the aftermath of overcoming a toxic situation on the single Warpath. “The older you get I think the less you feel the need to put a filter on,” he explains. “I think honesty just starts to come naturally. A lot of it’s out of exhaustion, you just kind of go, ‘Well, that’s one extra layer I’m putting on, I’ll take it off and let’s just be honest.’”
While lyrically Matt may be more liberated, musically he and Tom seem to have painted themselves into a bit of a corner. Posting on social media prior to the record’s release, they wrote: “We accidentally made all of our new songs really hard to play.”
“We didn’t intentionally,” laughs Matt. “We wanted to push ourselves, but also we wanted to give ourselves no limits like we normally would, with it just being two of us, so we thought just keep going and we’ll figure it out later. And now we’re in the process of figuring it out later. We fucked around and we found out.”
Haggard Cat’s commitment to treading their own path is in part the reason they left Earache, the label that put out their first two albums. They wanted a lot more say in what they did, “And that didn’t really suit us,” admits Matt. “So, when it came to lockdown hitting, the album coming out and us taking a long hard look in the mirror at both us and Earache, it was like, ‘Shall we call it here?’ It felt rough at the time, but I look back to it, and it was the right decision. We had to leave.”
Cut to a fortuitous run-in at a party with his old friend Justine Jones of Employed To Serve, who co-runs Church Road Records with bandmate Sammy Urwin. Haggard Cat are now on a label helmed by friends they toured with back in 2010, offering a homecoming of sorts. Gearing up for their first headline tour in five years, meanwhile, the duo’s biggest headline show to date recently took place at Nottingham’s Rescue Rooms and was a proper hometown extravaganza, with guest appearances from their former Heck and Baby Godzilla bandmates Jonny Hall and Paul Shelley, plus Palm Reader’s Andy Gillan and Tom's wife Ruena, to name a few.
So, how does it feel to be hitting the road again? “Scary,” Tom admits. “Our setlist has completely changed,” Matt explains. “Today [at Noizzefest] will feel completely different to what we’ve done in the past. It all feels very, very new and fresh all of a sudden, after years and years of doing quite a similar thing.”
For those wondering if tracks from their more blues-rock leaning debut ‘Challenger’ will feature on the upcoming UK tour’s setlists, all hope is not lost. “There are moments from that record that every now and then I think are quite nice to bring back, quite a nice festival moment,” clarifies Matt. “But at the minute we’re trying to tread the line of, ‘How does this fit in a set of big, chunky, psych-y songs?’ We'll figure it out at some point. Never say die.”
Haggard Cat’s ‘The Pain That Orbits Life’ is out now on Church Road.
Haggard Cat Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu May 14 2026 - MANCHESTER Star and Garter
Fri May 15 2026 - GLASGOW Hug and Pint
Sat May 16 2026 - NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE Head Of Steam
Thu May 28 2026 - LONDON Black Heart
Fri May 29 2026 - SOUTHAMPTON Joiners
Sat May 30 2026 - BRISTOL Louisiana
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