The Wheel Workers finish a conversation with their younger selves on new album 'One More Thing To Say'

Imagine opening a box packed twenty years earlier and discovering that the contents still seem unfinished. That's exactly the peculiar sensation surrounding The Wheel Workers' new LP 'One More Thing To Say'.

The album carries the sound of a particular period in alternative rock, but it doesn't arrive preserved behind glass. Steven Higginbotham and his collaborators have taken recordings from the group's early years and allowed them to interact with musicianship, technology and perspective acquired much later. And the result has an unusual double exposure.

You can hear youth in the urgency of the arrangements. Guitars are frequently restless, moving from bright delayed patterns into dense bursts of distortion. Bass often becomes a repeating gravitational force around which the rest of the instrumentation moves. While synthesisers hover at the edges, adding colour without smoothing away the rougher character.

Steve Christensen's mix gives the album clarity without sanitising it, allowing the material to retain its rawer instincts while making the sixteen-song journey feel coherent. The production doesn't attempt to disguise the project's complicated history, but instead makes that history usable as individual songs reveal different aspects of the band over time.

'O'er The Sands' turns political anxiety into an expansive guitar piece, with mounting instrumental pressure matching its unease. While 'One Must Speak' has a more hypnotic momentum, transforming what began as a simpler composition into something significantly broader.

Then there's 'In The Breeze'. As the final track, it makes an interesting statement because its appeal lies in togetherness. Instead of building towards one member taking command, it highlights the chemistry of musicians collectively finding their way through a piece. And that's something that feels important after everything required to complete this album.

'One More Thing To Say' could easily have become a monument to what The Wheel Workers used to be. But instead, it argues that a band can have several versions of itself without one invalidating another.

The young musicians created the spark. The older musicians learned how to preserve it. And somewhere between those two points sits a record that belongs fully to neither era, which is precisely why it feels so enchanting.