Last year, I reviewed Shropshire “alt electronic” group, Thought Bubble’s sixth album, Mostly True. It was so good, it won a Lazland Award, and you can read my review by clicking on the button below:

Towards the end of 2025, they released an EP, A Made Up World, comprising four tracks, which I am slightly late to the party to, but can confirm that they will be releasing a full-length album, Who’s to Say? at the end of March, and I will be publishing a review around that time. You can view and order all their music at https://bubble.bandcamp.com/music

We start off with First Cigarette (48 years ago in my case, and three years since packing in), and Ricky is having an existential crisis, a whole pile of shit raining down on him, and rather regrets never having smoked his first cigarette. There is a video for this embedded below. It is decidedly trancey, the cigarette revolving around your head, noises swirling amidst the dystopian voice, the impending doom palpable, the listener wanting to reach out and pass a Senior Service to Ricky – if you are going to do it, you may as well make it a proper one. A winner for lovers of psych-driven electronica.

Cheat Codes suggests a somewhat sad individual hemmed in by a small bedroom, his life revolving around online games, and these only progressed by way of the eponymous codes, a modern commonality. I like the bass synth throbbing at the core of this, and here, the voice is evocative, fragile, crying out, the effects revolving around the subject in his room, taunting him in the manner of the games he can’t master without the shortcuts.

Radio Mast is an angry lyric, the lies spewed out by the mass media, ill-qualified narcissists lecturing, hectoring, ultimately controlling our everyday lives, and we, meanwhile, are fascinated, as opposed to appalled, by the billionaires who don’t have to count the penny’s at the end of every week. The effects mimic the waves emanating from the mast, an almost permanent sort of noise permeating our lives in the 21st century. The vocals on this are very strong, descriptive and calling out to his fellow humans to notice. There is some good percussion on this, a bass melody, and it is expansive in its sound.

We finish with Floating Up the Steeple, which is a title in itself. I have embedded this below. It has a fine rhythm at its heart, and the intensity builds ever so slowly, but palpably, the lonely voices bringing to mind humanity as simply jetsam in the sea of life. As the track builds to its conclusion, acute listeners will discern influence from Gabriel on his third album, the experimental track preceding Biko.

I like this band. What they do is clever, with thoughtful lyrics, and interesting soundscapes which fans of TD, Krautrock, and the like should lap up.