There is something suspicious about a Warmduscher song calling itself “Pure At The Heart.”
Suspicious in the best possible way. Suspicious like a white suit at 5.30am. Suspicious like a man telling you he has changed while still wearing yesterday’s wristband. Suspicious like tenderness found in the smoking area, holding a plastic cup, making absolutely no promises.
Warmduscher have never been a band you go to for cleanliness. They are not here to polish the silverware of British guitar music. They are here to lick the spoon, pocket the cutlery, short the lights, and turn the wedding reception into a low-budget occult fundraiser. Since emerging from the same South London swamp system that produced various Fat White Family-adjacent creatures, Warmduscher have behaved less like a band than a recreational hazard. Garage rock, post-punk, funk, disco, electro, bad thoughts, worse shirts, good basslines. Their music has often sounded like a pub fight learning choreography.
But “Pure At The Heart,” featuring Janet Planet of Confidence Man, does something sneakier than simply keep the chaos going. It opens the blinds. Not all the way. Nobody needs that kind of exposure. Just enough to let in a strip of dawn.
The track appears at 01:47:50 on Yeah Bagel’s Open Format Transmission 2026.04, arriving late in the run, after the industrial bite, club ghosts and rave afterglow have already taken their turns at the wheel. By then, the transmission has earned a strange kind of softness. Not sentimentality. Not retreat. Something more interesting: the moment when the party has stopped pretending to be invincible.
That is where Warmduscher suddenly become useful in a different way. Not as the band kicking over the ashtray, but as the band noticing what the ashtray contains.
Warmduscher: The Beautifully Unwashed Machine
Warmduscher’s greatness has always been tied to their refusal to choose between sleaze and intelligence. They are often described through the usual post-punk vocabulary, but that undersells the point. Post-punk can sometimes become a museum word, a polite plaque screwed beside a broken thing. Warmduscher are not interested in preservation. They are interested in leakage.
Their songs ooze across genres because genre, for them, is not a border. It is an unattended back door.
There is disco in them, but not clean disco. More cracked mirror than mirrorball. There is funk, but it arrives with suspicious stains. There is punk, but not as heritage costume. There is garage rock, but the garage is probably being rented illegally by someone called Clams. Their records have always seemed populated by people who know too much about nightlife and not enough about breakfast. Characters stagger through them. Losers, hustlers, small-time prophets, rich creeps, mood merchants, semi-mystics, and men who definitely say “trust me” too often.
At the centre is the voice and presence of Clams Baker Jr., a frontman who understands that charisma is sometimes just panic with sunglasses on. Around him, Warmduscher build grooves that wobble between comedy and threat. They are funny, but never merely a joke. The laugh catches because there is a hook under it.
That matters. The band’s dirtbag theatre works because it has musical discipline underneath the spillage. Warmduscher know how to make a bassline move. They know how to let rhythm do character work. Their best songs don’t just describe degeneracy, they strut with it, overtip it, borrow its jacket, and leave through the fire exit.
By the time of Too Cold To Hold, though, there is a different pressure inside the machine. The album’s guest list, which includes Irvine Welsh, Lianne La Havas, Janet Planet, Jeshi and CouCou Chloe, suggests a band widening its social circle without cleaning up its habits. That is the important part. Warmduscher do not become respectable by inviting guests in. They become more dangerous, because each guest reveals another room in the same disreputable house.
“Pure At The Heart” is one of those rooms.
It is not Warmduscher abandoning their muck. It is Warmduscher finding the pulse inside it.
The Track: Last Ones on the Floor
“Pure At The Heart” sounds like it knows the exact point at which a night out becomes a memory while it is still happening.
That is its trick. It does not chase the peak-time explosion. It does not try to be the huge tune at midnight when everyone still believes in their own silhouette. It lives later than that. After the big declarations. After the first group has gone home. After someone has lost their jacket and decided this is now part of their personality. After the floor has thinned but deepened.
The song has emotional weight, but it refuses to wear the heavy coat. It moves with a kind of glittering limp. The sweetness is real, but it has street knowledge. There is a soft-focus glow to it, yet the edges remain Warmduscher’s: sly, louche, slightly damp, alive with bad decisions.
That makes Janet Planet’s presence more than decoration. She does not arrive as a pop feature pasted onto a rock band to improve the numbers. She arrives as a chemical agent. Her voice tilts the track toward lift-off, giving it a brighter surface without sanding away the grime underneath. It is not purity as innocence. It is purity as persistence. The part of you that remains intact after the club, the comedown, the compromise, the small humiliations, the fluorescent truth of morning.
The title matters because it sounds ridiculous and sincere at the same time. “Pure At The Heart” could be a compliment, a defence, a drunk confession, or the kind of thing someone says just before proving the opposite. Warmduscher understand that contradiction. Their entire catalogue lives there. They know that people are often most revealing when they are trying to perform themselves. They know that sleaze and vulnerability are not opposites. Sometimes sleaze is just vulnerability wearing too much aftershave.
Here, the band take the old Warmduscher ingredients, sweat, funk, swagger, gutter glamour, and allow something unexpectedly tender to rise through them. It is the sound of a rogue heart under cheap fabric. A disco ball reflected in a puddle. A love song that does not trust love songs but secretly wants one to save it anyway.
In the context of Open Format Transmission 2026.04, that late placement gives it extra force. After a tracklist that moves through industrial pressure, dubplate dread, club edits and mutant pop, “Pure At The Heart” feels like the strange little hymn you find near the end of the night. Not the moral of the story. Yeah Bagel does not do morals. More like the stain left on the story that somehow looks like a halo.
Janet Planet: Glitter With a Knife in Its Boot
Janet Planet brings a very particular kind of pop intelligence to “Pure At The Heart.”
As one of the front figures of Confidence Man, she has built a persona on the line between pop star, club mascot, performance artist and extremely stylish menace. Confidence Man’s world is often described as fun, but fun is too small a word. Their best work understands fun as strategy. Fun as voltage. Fun as a trapdoor beneath seriousness. They make dance music with eyebrows, choreography and a sense that the whole thing might be a brilliant scam that became true through sheer commitment.
Janet Planet’s great weapon is deadpan excess. She can deliver absurdity with the conviction of a weather warning. In Confidence Man, that works because the group’s whole apparatus is built around the theatrical promise of the night out: the costume, the pose, the body moving before the brain has finished objecting. But beneath the flash is a sharp understanding of pop mechanics. Repetition. Gesture. The right phrase in the right place. The bridge that turns a song from competent to possessed.
That is what she gives Warmduscher.
She does not make “Pure At The Heart” less Warmduscher. She makes it more three-dimensional. Without her, you can imagine the track staying in the band’s usual nightworld, charming, grubby, funny, maybe even touching. With her, it gets altitude. The glitter does not cover the dirt. It catches in it.
There is also a satisfying cultural exchange happening here. Warmduscher bring the sticky-floor London grotesque. Janet Planet brings the Australian electro-pop art of total commitment, the ability to make ridiculousness feel aerodynamic. Together, they meet at the only place that makes sense: after closing, when nobody sensible is still dancing and therefore everyone left is telling the truth.
That truth is not grand. It is not a manifesto. It is smaller and better than that.
Someone is still here.
Someone still wants to move.
Someone still has a ridiculous little flame inside them, despite the evidence.
That is the heart the song is talking about.
Not pure because it has avoided contamination. Pure because it has survived it.
The Yeah Bagel Case
“Pure At The Heart” is exactly the kind of track Yeah Bagel exists to catch in its teeth.
It is not the loudest song in the room. It is not the cleanest argument. It is not even necessarily the strangest thing Warmduscher have done. But it is a hinge. It lets us talk about the band’s grubby mythology without reducing them to cartoon degenerates. It lets us talk about Janet Planet without flattening her into “guest vocalist” or “party-pop cameo.” It lets us talk about nightlife as something more complicated than escapism.
Because the club is never only escape. It is also laboratory, refuge, theatre, accident site, emotional lost property office. People go there to disappear and end up revealing themselves. They go to forget and accidentally remember the body. They go looking for noise and find, if they are lucky or doomed enough, one clear feeling moving under it.
Warmduscher understand the doomed part. Janet Planet understands the lift. “Pure At The Heart” works because it needs both.
It is filthy and sweet. It is sincere and crooked. It knows the floor is sticky, the lights are cruel, the stranger may remain a stranger, and the walk home may be longer than expected.
Still, something glows.
Still, someone sings.
Still pure at the heart, somehow.
Ridiculous, obviously.
But also true.
Yeah Bagel 