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'Cutthroat' is Shame at their blistering best; an unapologetic new album made with Grammy winning producer John Congleton at the helm. “It’s about the cowards, the cunts, the hypocrites,” says vocalist Charlie Steen. “Let’s face it, there’s a lot of them around right now.”

Still in their twenties and having proved themselves several times over via legendary live shows and three critically-acclaimed albums, the five childhood friends - Charlie Steen, guitarists Sean Coyle-Smith and Eddie Green, bassist Josh Finerty and drummer Charlie Forbes - went into 'Cutthroat' ready to create a new Ground Zero.

“This is about who we are,” says Steen. “Our live shows aren’t performance art - they’re direct, confrontational and raw. That’s always been the root of us. We live in crazy times. But it’s not about ‘Poor me.’ It’s about ‘Fuck you’.”

Crucial to this incendiary new outlook was producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen). From their initial meeting, Congleton’s no-bullshit approach became a guiding force to streamline the band’s ideas.

Stamped throughout with Shame’s trademark sense of humour, the album takes on the big issues of today and gleefully toys with them. With Trump in the Whitehouse and Shame holed up in Salvation Studios in Brighton, they cast a merciless eye on themes of conflict and corruption; hunger and desire; lust, envy and the omnipresent shadow of cowardice.

Musically, too, the record plays with visceral new ideas. Making electronic music on tour for fun, Coyle-Smith had previously seen the loops he was crafting as a separate entity to the things he wrote for Shame. Then, he realised, maybe they didn’t have to be. “This time, anything could go if it sounded good and you got it right,” he says.

'Cutthroat’s first single and title track takes this idea and runs with it into, quite possibly, the best song Shame have ever laid to tape. It’s a ball of barely-contained attitude packed into three minutes of indie dancefloor hedonism. It also masterfully introduces the lyrical outlook of the record: one where cocksure arrogance and deep insecurity are two sides of the same coin.

“I was reading a lot of Oscar Wilde plays where everything was about paradox,” Steen explains. “In ‘Cutthroat’, it’s that whole idea from Lady Windermere’s Fan, ‘Life’s far too important to be taken seriously’.”

This cheeky self-awareness, too, is important. As much as Shame want to burst the bubbles of bluster and ego, encouraging us to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, ‘He who casts the first stone…’, they also understand that, at its heart, life is often ridiculous.

The result is an album that revels in the idiosyncrasies of life, raising an eyebrow and asking the ugly questions that so often get tactfully brushed over. But the one answer that 'Cutthroat' gives with a resounding flourish is that, right now, Shame have never sounded better.