“Angus Andrew has announced details of the new Liars album, A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans, set for release on 5 March 2027. The album launches today with the first taste of what to expect from Liars’ 11th studio album in the shape of Ice Pick, Kalamazoo, alongside news of a UK / European tour, the first in nearly 10 years.  The tour will include a rare chance to see Liars’ incendiary live performance up close in intimate venues, including London’s Moth Club on 20 October, and includes a one-off 20th anniversary performance of Drum’s Not Dead with two very different Polish percussionists, including Macio Moretti, at Unsound Festival – full details below.

Liars’ staggering new album A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans harnesses Angus’s incomparable gift for sonic world-building to confront the bureaucratic absurdity and corporate power he encountered while living in middle America, and Ice Pick, Kalamazoo introduces some of these themes…”

Watch the video for Ice Pick, Kalamazoo right here…

Ice Pick, Kalamazoo

“I went to visit my friend Clemens in Paris.

We sat outside a café early in the morning and I told him about the factory [redacted]. I told him about America. I told him about all the things I didn’t understand. I just spewed a lot of my fears and angst and misunderstanding at him.

His response was simple. He handed me a 3D camera.

Go document it. Be the correspondent.

It was a turning point. I went from quite lost to very determined. Capturing Kalamazoo felt critical and I was relentless at it. I spent days searching for the realities of the everyday world. Or at least my perspective of it, which was utterly screwed.
Baffled. Angry. Scared.

I photographed the factories. The roads. The houses. The signs. The empty spaces. The things that seemed completely ordinary.

I was looking at everything.

The camera shot two images at once. Slightly askew. Clemens showed me how a gif could be made, creating an uneasy effect. Like shaking your head. It felt like how I felt. We developed this language.

Then the No Kings marches came around. It felt natural to document those too. As ardently as everything else.

But something changed.

There was joy. People were making signs. Making jokes. Dressing up. Standing next to strangers. Filling the streets with things they wanted to say.

Taking photographs felt like a happy contribution. A way of honoring the messages people were putting on those signs.

No Kings became a wonderful counterpoint to the images I had been making alone.

The song itself is angry. I was very angry when I wrote it.

People have asked who’s chanting the words “No! Maybe! No! Maybe! No!”

That’s been redacted.

What I can say is that during our first recording session in Sydney we spent an afternoon “speed dating” in the studio.

Cameron and Laurence sat at their instruments, at the ready, and I would blast them with random sounds from Kalamazoo. Often quite abstract sounds. No rhythm, no pitch. Long, short. I wanted their first reaction. Their knee-jerk physical response. That’s how we started “Ice Pick.”

And I was angry.

I’m still angry.

Angry Angus”.

“Shortly after relocating to Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his wife and daughter, Angus Andrew smelled something. A thick odour surrounded their home and his daughter’s school: toxic hydrogen sulphide, among other pollutants, released by a local packaging factory at levels deemed so dangerous that the state health department advised residents to “stay indoors”. Angus soon found himself drawn into an uphill campaign to hold the factory accountable, confronting a tangle of environmental damage, corporate responsibility and institutional inertia. He absorbed the frustrations and absurdities of the experience into Liars’ music, transforming the realities of everyday life into something stranger and more unsettling.

“You become so used to something, you lose your sense of it.”

That idea sits at the centre of A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans: how injustice can become part of the background of everyday life, and how exhausting it can be to fight forces that seem too powerful to move. The title is based on an actual Michigan law that prohibits local governments from banning single-use plastic bags. Its absurd bureaucratic logic became a kind of shorthand for Angus’s experience of Michigan, where attempts to reduce environmental harm could themselves become something to prohibit.

Formed in New York in 2000, Liars have always been a shapeshifting, alien presence at the edges of contemporary music. From the shifty dance-punk of 2001’s They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top to a string of radically inventive albums – including 2006’s Drums Not Dead, 2017’s TFCF and 2021’s The Apple Drop – Liars have never stood still. The Apple Drop was released as lockdowns made touring impossible and, for the first time since he was a teenager, Angus stopped thinking about making another record. Instead, he threw himself into other projects: founding the record label No Gold and experimental music platform Essential Tremors. “Both of those things were really about listening,” he says, “stepping back from being a full-time creator and connecting with these other artists”. Through both projects, he also began “listening and responding to the environment in Kalamazoo.”

After the longest period of his career without making music, Angus eventually realised something strange had happened: he had been making an album the whole time. He just hadn’t created any sound yet. He was not interested in making a traditional political album, or in turning the record into a soapbox for a particular cause. Instead, he became interested in the absurdity of the bureaucracy surrounding these struggles, and in the imbalance of power that allows corporations to exert influence across so many levels of everyday life. “It’s got more to do with the perception of things than modern pollution – how these things that can be a constant in your life become sort of ingrained and invisible.”

The album was written and recorded between the States and Australia, where Angus now resides. Reuniting with avant-garde jazz drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell – both collaborators on The Apple Drop and touring partners since TFCF – the three musicians brought an intuitive working language to the sessions. Rather than arriving with finished songs, they relied on trust, improvisation and reaction – allowing ideas to evolve across continents without losing their centre of gravity. 

A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans ultimately becomes a different kind of political album – not only concerned with protest, but also with what it costs a person to keep on fighting. “It wasn’t just the environment that was polluted,” Angus says. “It was also my mind.”

A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans will be released on white recycled and recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET) vinyl, CD and digitally via Mute on 5 March – Links

LIARS LIVE – AUTUMN 2026

2 Oct – Bucharest (RO), Control Club / Opening Party, 3 Oct – Nantes (FR), Le Lieu Unique, 5 Oct – Milan (IT), Arci Bellezza, 9 Oct – Kraków (PL), Unsound, one-off performance of Drums Not Dead, 10 Oct – Belgrade (RS), Changeover Festival, 12 Oct – Prague (CZ), Punctum13 Oct – Berlin (DE), Neue Zukunft, 15 Oct – Amsterdam (NL), Paradiso, 17 Oct – Kortrijk (NL), Atelier Nooitgedacht, 18 Oct – Liege (BE), Kultura, 20 Oct – London (UK), Moth Club, 22 Oct – Paris (FR), Boule Noire, 24 Oct – Copenhagen (DK), Ideal Bar. Tickets on sale from 10am local time on Friday 11 Sep. More info here