Black Honey share new single ‘Shallow’

Today, Black Honey share new single ‘Shallow’, a swaggering anthem primed for festival season – but despite its infectious sound, the track is anything but a people-pleaser. Frontwoman Izzy B. Phillips‘ pen is as sharp as ever, taking aim at a world which favours surface over substance. It arrives as another temptation ahead of their forthcoming new album, Soak, due for release August 15th.

For this album, Phillips is prizing intention and emotional resonance above technical perfection – and ‘Shallow’ rides the knife’s edge of both. Experimenting with a new, stream-of-consciousness writing style, the polemical tone of the previous albums is overridden by diving into grey areas and complexity. Her lyrics, exalted by the band, have never been so brilliantly acerbic: “Loosen the screw to reassemble / Backstage kind of influential / Drank your rider dry it’s so… sha-la-la-la-low”.

Speaking on the track, she shares: “‘Shallow’ is about the brain rot, being a hypocrite and still participating in a social discourse despite feeling shy and uncomfortable. It’s a bit of a view from space and all whilst summing up the human experience into two-line consumables and clickbait.”

After their previous records have drawn from the cinematic worlds of Quentin Tarantino (Black Honey, Written & Directed) and Wes Anderson (Fistful of Peaches), Soak is decidedly Kubrickian. Steeped in retrofuturism and unsettling geometry, it sets the visual backdrop for the record’s wild dynamic shifts from the gothic to the psychedelic.

Speaking on the vision for the album, Phillips shares: “Soak is me processing a decade of touring and creating music and art as an addict. It’s me picking at the layers of messy, romantic, confusing, woozy, beautiful and fucked up things. Who I thought I was, who I was supposed to be and who looks back at me now are all so different but I’m kind of here for it.”

It follows on from their era-announcing new single ‘Psycho’ – Black Honey at their finest; twisting a melodic pop hook into an unnerving, rock-driven distortion of itself. The video depicts Phillips trapped in a dystopian facility where prisoners are controlled through an endless flood of artificial realities. Strapped into a chair, her mind is force-fed fabricated experiences until she becomes numb. Similar to our digital lives in 2025, then. As the cycle repeats, she escapes, discovering a control hub – a miniature model of reality. She rips out its wires, breaking free from the system. Is it possible to escape the trappings of our own dark realities as easily?

Another taste of what’s to come arrived in the form of ‘Dead’, an anthem of dissociation with gloriously scuzzy, do-your-worst chorus taunts. Her storytelling takes on a newfound sharpness – quite literally. ‘Dead’ evokes the visceral eyeball torture of A Clockwork Orange: “And you couldn’t decide to stab my back or my eyes / Oh no, I know what you like / Just press on the knife”.

And then, of course, there is the glowering, gothic brilliance of ‘Insulin’ – another dimension to a band who continue to reinvent themselves four albums deep. The track explores harrowing lived experiences of sexual assault, but written in an instinctive, free-form style. Indeed, the phrase, “You’re fucking with my insulin,” was merely a placeholder initially. It was only later that Phillips realised how perfect a metaphor the hormone provided with the way it can be ruled by emotional dysregulation.

Black Honey are an independent British rock band who over the last near-decade have increasingly made major moves with their last two albums bothering the UK Top 10 (#7 and #6 respectively). A melting pot of alt-rock and dark-pop – they have cut through the noise with every release, defiantly forging their own path with each record and exhilarating sold-out crowds all over the world. Their eponymous debut album was released in 2018, Written & Directed followed in 2021 with their last album A Fistful of Peaches landing in 2023.

A new chapter in the unfolding Black Honey saga is upon us – and it looks like we’re in for one hell of a ride. Alongside their performance on July 15th for DORK’s 100 Festival, see full details below for the band’s upcoming UK album release tour.