Sightseeing Crew capture the beautiful chaos of modern life on 'Muffled Ears, the World Sounds Bad Quality'

After making waves with their 2024 debut full-length 'Let the Deadstock Breathe', Sightseeing Crew now return with 'Muffled Ears, the World Sounds Bad Quality', a record that hums with tension between the analogue and the algorithmic.

Emerging from Reading, the project occupies a fascinating space where expansive guitar atmospheres collide with free-flowing sax and melodies that feel intentionally weathered around the edges. There’s a deliberate roughness here as though each sound has been slightly bent out of shape to better reflect the emotional landscape it inhabits.

At the centre of the album is a recurring figure in a hyperconnected age, struggling to reconcile inner experience with the constant barrage of external noise. That narrative thread runs quietly through the record, giving cohesion to songs that otherwise twist through multiple musical corridors. Themes of routine, economic grind, and the low-level exhaustion of existing in a screen-saturated culture surface again and again.

Lead single 'Another Day in Uniform' encapsulates this tension perfectly. It builds in waves, looping back on itself with a kind of anxious propulsion. The instrumentation swells and contracts, guitars stretching outward while percussion keeps things pinned to the ground. There’s a hypnotic quality to it, as if the song itself can’t quite escape its own circuitry.

Elsewhere, the album veers between expansive instrumental passages and moments of fragile introspection. Saxophones spiral above dense arrangements, sometimes mournful, sometimes defiant. Guitars shimmer, distort, recede, then surge back with renewed urgency.

What’s most striking is how accessible the record remains despite its experimental impulses. Where earlier material leaned more heavily into progressive abstraction, this release feels more emotionally direct. The hooks are clearer, the melodies more pronounced, yet the edges remain jagged enough to keep things unpredictable.

Ultimately, 'Muffled Ears, the World Sounds Bad Quality' captures the sensation of living in a world where clarity feels elusive but still worth chasing. It’s an album about disconnection, yes, but also about persistence, and continuing to search for meaning, even when the signal crackles.

Sightseeing Crew have delivered a record that feels both timely and timeless: a swirling, sax-laced meditation on modern alienation that never loses sight of its melodic core. It captures atmosphere, tension, and the quiet reassurance that someone else hears the static too.