There are bands that begin with a manifesto, bands assembled by management and bands that form because somebody has a collection of songs that simply don’t belong anywhere else.
Insecure Men belong firmly in the third category.
The project emerged in South London around 2015 as an outlet for Saul Adamczewski, co-founder and guitarist of Fat White Family, and the quieter, more melodic music accumulating outside that band’s increasingly combustible universe. Even the name carried a Fat Whites in-joke: according to the band’s later biography, someone had suggested Fat White Family ought really to be called “Insecure Men Who Look At Their Phones Too Much.”
But what initially looked like a side project gradually became something considerably more important.
Adamczewski formed Insecure Men with his old schoolfriend Ben Romans-Hopcraft, frontman of Childhood. Romans-Hopcraft wasn’t merely another musician recruited for the record. Adamczewski has described knowing him since primary-school days in Herne Hill and characterised him as the calm, rational counterweight to his own personality. Early incarnations also involved Fat White Family keyboard player Nathan Saoudi, while the expanding live band would eventually include musicians including Marley Mackey, Victor Jakeman, Alex White, Jack Everett and the wonderfully named steel-pan and vibraphone player Steely Dan Monte.
The musical distinction from Fat White Family was apparent almost immediately.
Where the Fat Whites thrived on confrontation, grime and instability, Insecure Men allowed Adamczewski to indulge a much softer collection of obsessions: exotica, lounge music, easy listening, primitive electronics and elegantly constructed pop. He told So Young in 2017 that the impulse actually predated Fat White Family: he’d always wanted to make music that was “a little bit more sad”.
There was another significant connection.
While working in upstate New York on The Moonlandingz, Adamczewski began recording the material that would become the first Insecure Men album. Sean Lennon became involved, eventually producing it. According to a later account of the sessions, Adamczewski initially recorded his songs onto tape using an old Tascam before layers of instrumentation gradually transformed them into something much larger.
The resulting self-titled Insecure Men arrived on 23 February 2018.
It was an oddly beautiful record. The arrangements could suggest some forgotten lounge-pop LP rescued from a charity-shop box, but the subject matter certainly didn’t. Songs wandered through celebrity, addiction, death and assorted corners of British cultural unpleasantness. The record contained “Subaru Nights”, “Teenage Toy”, “Mekong Glitter”, “Heathrow”, “The Saddest Man in Penge”, “Cliff Has Left the Building” and “Whitney Houston & I”.
The apparent wholesomeness was therefore something of a trick.
The ugliness hadn’t disappeared. Someone had simply put a nice cardigan over it.
Eight years later
Then Insecure Men largely vanished from view.
Adamczewski released the solo-performed covers collection Karaoke for One, Vol. 1 later in 2018, but a second proper Insecure Men album wouldn’t arrive until November 2025. By then, circumstances had changed dramatically.
The band’s label, Fat Possum, describes the period preceding the record as one of serious personal collapse for Adamczewski, involving opioid addiction and psychosis during 2024, followed by withdrawal and recovery. Adamczewski has spoken subsequently about getting clean and recognising that the songs he’d accumulated offered a route back into making music.
Those songs became A Man For All Seasons, released by Fat Possum on 7 November 2025.
This time the record was made at Konk Studios in Hornsey, North London, with Raf Rundell producing. The lineup included Marley Mackey, Victor Jakeman, Alex White and Steely Dan Monte, while Romans-Hopcraft’s role was considerably smaller than on the first album.
The result isn’t simply Insecure Men II.
The exotica and woozy lounge-pop haven’t disappeared, but they’re joined by country, folk, synth-pop and considerably more direct songwriting. Where the first record could stare at the grotesqueries of other people’s lives, much of A Man For All Seasons turns the camera around.
Which makes its second track rather wonderful.
CLEANING BRICKS
“Cleaning Bricks” sounds like someone has accidentally found a lost radio hit inside a building site.
And, remarkably, that isn’t very far from the truth.
Adamczewski says the song predates Fat White Family. He and Nathan Saoudi had a job at Camberwell Grove, cleaning cement from a large pile of old London bricks. While doing it, they started singing a chorus about the task.
That was the genesis of “Cleaning Bricks”.
Adamczewski apparently regarded the thing as essentially a joke. Other people didn’t.
Over the years friends kept telling him it was catchy. Producer and Speedy Wunderground founder Dan Carey was particularly persistent, repeatedly asking whether Adamczewski had finally recorded the brick-cleaning song. Carey eventually gave him studio time to do exactly that.
Adamczewski’s intended reference point is almost magnificently unfashionable: Rick Springfield’s “Jessie’s Girl.”
His own description of the ambition is better than any critic’s could be: “Real cheese but good cheese.”
That’s pretty much the record.
“Cleaning Bricks” is three minutes and six seconds of Insecure Men temporarily discovering the uncomplicated pleasure of making a pop song. Synths sparkle, the rhythm pushes forward and the chorus possesses the slightly ridiculous persistence of something invented to make manual labour marginally less tedious.
But its history makes the song stranger than straightforward pastiche.
Here is a tune conceived by two young men cleaning reclaimed London bricks, carried around for years while the people responsible for it formed bands, made records, fell apart, got older and eventually returned to it. Something disposable refused to be disposed of.
The joke survived long enough to become the song.
On an album preoccupied with damage, recovery and looking backwards, that feels unexpectedly appropriate.
BUTTER
Five tracks later comes “Butter”.
And suddenly somebody has turned the lights off.
If “Cleaning Bricks” demonstrates the bright, junk-shop-pop end of A Man For All Seasons, “Butter” provides its considerably more menacing counterpart.
Contemporary reviews noticed the distinction. Far Out described “Cleaning Bricks” in terms of bright synth-pop and brass, while identifying an industrial, post-punk atmosphere around “Butter”. HIVE similarly heard the latter as a partial return to the musical territory of Adamczewski’s Fat White Family years, driven by brooding vocals and a pounding bassline.
It’s an important contrast because Insecure Men’s appeal has always depended upon things not quite agreeing with one another.
Beautiful music houses ugly subjects. Easy listening becomes uneasy listening. Humour sits beside genuine damage. Something apparently frivolous suddenly develops teeth.
“Cleaning Bricks” and “Butter” therefore make an unexpectedly useful two-song introduction to the band as they exist now.
One is absurdly immediate.
The other prowls.
One originates in the boredom of an old manual job and eventually mutates into shiny pop.
The other reminds you that however far Adamczewski travels into country music, lounge, exotica or sophisticated songwriting, the darker machinery that powered his earlier work hasn’t been entirely dismantled.
And that’s probably for the best.
A Man For All Seasons needs both.
Its nine tracks don’t present recovery as some neat cinematic transformation in which everything terrible happens in Act Two and everybody emerges purified for the finale. The record described by Adamczewski and his label is the product of somebody continuing to work through what happened.
Sometimes that produces wounded songs.
Sometimes it produces something sinister.
And sometimes, apparently, recovery sounds like finally recording the stupidly catchy song about bricks you’ve had stuck in your head for years.
OPEN FORMAT TRANSMISSION 2026.07
Which brings us to OPEN FORMAT TRANSMISSION 2026.07.
At 01:19:24, “Cleaning Bricks” arrives.
At 01:22:18, it runs directly into “Butter”.
No intervening track. No attempt to select the most representative Insecure Men song and move politely along.
For just over six minutes, the transmission gets both faces.
01:19:24 — Insecure Men, “Cleaning Bricks”
01:22:18 — Insecure Men, “Butter”
The pairing works because the contradiction is the point.
First comes the grubby little work song that spent years waiting to realise it was pop music. Then comes its darker sibling, stalking in immediately behind it.
Taken together they make a compact argument for why Insecure Men remain such an interesting proposition nearly a decade after their debut.
There are plenty of artists capable of making darkness sound dark.
Insecure Men are much better at the more unsettling trick.
They make it catchy.
Yeah Bagel 