There was always something slightly suspicious about calling Working Men’s Club a post-punk band.
Too tidy. Too easy. Too much guitar-shop taxonomy applied to music that frequently seemed more interested in what happened after somebody locked the guitars away and discovered a drum machine at four in the morning.
From the beginning, Working Men’s Club understood the peculiar chemistry between Northern English guitar music and the dancefloor: repetition becoming propulsion, anxiety becoming rhythm, alienation discovering that it can actually move its feet. On “Devout”, that machinery is still running.
But something has changed inside it.
There’s a pulse now that sounds suspiciously like a heart.
RETURN TO THE FLOOR
“Devout” arrived on 8 September 2026 as the first Working Men’s Club release since Fear Fear in 2022, and the project’s first single for Domino. It is co-produced by Sydney Minsky Sargeant with Atticus Ross, the composer, producer and Nine Inch Nails member whose fingerprints have appeared across some of the most unsettling electronic music and film scores of the past two decades.
That combination makes almost indecent amounts of sense.
Working Men’s Club have always operated in the territory where dance music becomes slightly threatening. Their 2020 self-titled debut established a vocabulary of synths, drum machines, post-punk abrasion and rave momentum; Fear Fear pushed further into darker and more industrial electronic territory.
Ross doesn’t arrive on “Devout” to bolt Nine Inch Nails onto the side of the vehicle.
The intervention feels subtler than that.
The track materialises rather than begins. Electronics loom into view, layers accumulating until the whole thing starts exerting gravitational pull. Sargeant’s voice sits inside the construction rather than floating cleanly above it. NME describes the opening as “intense, looming electronica”, with the instrumentation steadily increasing around his distinctive vocal.
And then comes the interesting part.
It opens up.
Not into uncomplicated release, exactly. Working Men’s Club were never likely to start handing out glowsticks and promising everything would be fine. But “Devout” allows euphoria into the room.
The official description is unusually accurate: the raw urgency of the first two records remains, but is now “distilled with a dose of euphoria.”
That distinction matters.
This isn’t darkness followed by light.
It is darkness discovering light is another useful frequency.
SYDNEY MINSKY SARGEANT, BETWEEN RECORDS
Four years separate Fear Fear from “Devout”, but Sargeant hasn’t exactly spent them staring at the calendar.
In 2025 he released Lunga, his first solo album, turning away from some of Working Men’s Club’s outward force towards something considerably more introspective. He subsequently joined Daniel Avery and James Greenwood, aka Ghost Culture, for the Demise Of Love EP.
Those excursions matter when you return to “Devout”.
Because perhaps the biggest development here isn’t production at all.
It’s vulnerability.
Working Men’s Club lyrics have traditionally been oblique enough to make interpretation feel like trying to read a notice through nightclub smoke. Images arrive, collide and disappear. Emotion is present, certainly, but frequently encoded.
Domino specifically identifies “Devout” as a change in Sargeant’s songwriting, saying the song brings vulnerability into those characteristically abstract lyrics.
That makes the title beautifully ambiguous.
Devout.
Devoted to whom?
To what?
A person? A belief? A memory? Music? The ritual of returning to the same room, the same machines, the same beat and asking them to tell you something different this time?
Sargeant isn’t providing an instruction manual.
He has offered only a wonderfully economical explanation for choosing this particular track:
“Devout always felt like the right song to return with.”
Quite.
Sometimes the record knows before you do.
THE MACHINE IS STILL THE MACHINE
There is a temptation whenever an artist introduces vulnerability to describe the result as mature.
Let’s not.
Rock criticism has committed enough crimes.
What’s happening on “Devout” is more interesting. Working Men’s Club haven’t traded intensity for introspection. They’ve discovered that introspection can itself be intense.
The rhythmic insistence remains. The electronics still grind and shimmer. Sargeant still sounds as though he is broadcasting from somewhere halfway between the dancefloor and the emergency exit.
But the emotional architecture has shifted.
Where earlier Working Men’s Club records could make anxiety enormous, “Devout” seems interested in what happens when you stop treating vulnerability as something that needs disguising.
That might be where Ross proves particularly valuable. His best production work understands scale without confusing scale for volume. A tiny sound can become threatening. A repeated figure can become obsessive. Empty space can carry as much weight as distortion.
“Devout” uses that logic beautifully.
It builds.
It presses.
Then it lets air through.
A NEW LABEL, WITHOUT A FACTORY RESET
The move to Domino is significant too.
Working Men’s Club’s first two albums appeared through Heavenly Recordings. “Devout” is their Domino debut, with the label indicating that further music will follow.
Yet there is no frantic rebranding exercise here.
Longtime Working Men’s Club visual collaborator SJ Hockett designed the single artwork, maintaining continuity with the project’s existing visual world. The accompanying visualiser is directed by Innerstrings, perhaps best known in this particular corner of electronic culture for their ongoing visual work with Overmono.
That feels appropriate.
“New era” is one of those phrases record labels adore. Usually it means somebody changed their haircut.
Here it feels more credible.
Not because Working Men’s Club have discarded what came before, but because “Devout” sounds like somebody has spent four years taking the machine apart, examining its components, wandering off to build several other machines, then returning to discover what the original one can now do.
DEVOUT
The cleverest thing about “Devout” may ultimately be that it doesn’t behave like a comeback single.
There is no desperate reminder of past glories. No enormous neon WORKING MEN’S CLUB ARE BACK sign hanging above the chorus. No attempt to compress the first two albums into three minutes and reassure everyone that nothing has changed.
Instead, it moves forward.
The industrial pressure remains.
The dancefloor remains.
The strange collision between Northern post-punk history and electronic futurism remains.
But vulnerability has entered the circuitry.
And suddenly the title begins to feel less like a description of belief than an explanation of why Working Men’s Club still exists.
Because beneath all those machines, repetition has always been a form of devotion.
You return to the beat.
You return to the room.
You return to the thing that once made sense.
And you see what it tells you now.
Working Men’s Club – “Devout”
Released: 8 September 2026
Label: Domino Recording Co.
Co-production: Sydney Minsky Sargeant / Atticus Ross
Visualiser: Innerstrings
Artwork: SJ Hockett
Running time: 3:37
Devout appears on Yeah Bagel's Open Format Transmission 2026.08 at 01:43:44
