From the opening riff onward, “Spartak,” the new single from the U.K. band shame is simply locked in. In its forthright tunefulness and currents of insolence, it’s like the sort of song that could have resulted had the Godfathers and the Fall merged into a supergroup back in the day. The collaboration would have obviously imploded almost immediately, but they could have conceivably cracked off one great single first. And it would have had lines just like “Don’t climb onto that high horse/ Cause the saddle doesn’t fit ya/ I’ll only cast the first stone/ If I’m sure that it will hit ya.” And had that single had arrived when I was a nineteen-year-old college DJ, expressing all my rage and romanticism with every third song I added to the playlist, I would have spun “Spartak” a ridiculous number of times.

Cutthroat, the new album from shame, is scheduled for release in September.