It's daunting to try and explain why Cardiacs is my favorite band—why, no matter what I listen to and what I experience and what I explore, there is a hard line separating Cardiacs from everything else, all the geniuses, all the virtuosos, all the astonishing joys that music has to offer.¹ It's even more daunting to try and make sense of their new album LSD, released more than 26 years after their last record, a full generation after Cardiacs stopped being Cardiacs, nearly two decades after a strange and devastating tragedy that left frontman/singer/songwriter Tim Smith paralyzed, sick, and eventually dead. How do you make sense of something within the context of a band that needs some serious contextualization themselves?

Bear with me. We will make it through this together.

Here's a strange detail that feels relevant: Smith delivered his band's parts to them as sheet music, despite Cardiacs sounding like the least likely band to have any overlap with chamber music or the classical world. Many people immediately interpret their sound as sheer chaos, jarring howling noise. But what they're hearing, and what they find so jarring, is order, meticulousness, patterns operating within a medium and at a pace that they're not braced for. It's telling that one of the most-acclaimed groups that directly sprang out of Cardiacs was the North Sea Radio Orchestra, which pursues a similar melodic and rhythmic density in a context where that kind of thing is more recognizable, and more laudable. Compare that to something like the Cardiacs classic Fiery Gun Hand, and you can simultaneously see the similarities and understand why people find it so much harder to wrap their heads around the latter.

Cardiacs is intense, and Cardiacs is loud. The proper word for it might be cathartic: they pursue emotional release in the most vivid and exultational way they can, as all good pop and/or metal does (and Cardiacs is both). But they pursue it with compositional rigor, with pre-meditated cleverness and ingenuity, for all they deliver it with a bombast that seems to preclude any such forethought. That's the seeming contradiction that drives the band as a whole: an aggressive pursuit of splendid composition on the one hand and blistering delivery on the other, in a way that seems to encompass everything that makes great music great all at once.

You can get into the weeds more than that—focusing on the extraordinary intelligence with which Smith explored ways to make his compositions more intricate and complex, or delving into the brilliance of the individual musicians he surrounded himself with—but there's no need. Suffice it to say that Cardiacs knew what they wanted to be from the very start, going back to compositions Smith wrote when they were all still teenagers—original teenage recording here—and that they never stopped evolving, such that each of their five studio albums sounds like a drastic transformation from the one before it. 

That's all they released: five albums, across twelve years. Then Tim's horrible accident, and then twenty-six years, and then a sixth, miraculous release.
 

Over that quarter-century, Cardiacs' influence on music and culture has quietly spread. You may not know their closest contemporaries—their local music scene was brilliant but, well, local—but you know artists who know Cardiacs. Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz fame was a huge fan of theirs. Radiohead used to open for them, once upon a time. Mike Patton and Mr. Bungle draw obvious stylistic cues from them; Muse's Matt Bellamy once said that, when he couldn't figure out how to make a song work, he'd ask himself: "What would Tim Smith do?" The twitchy, frenetic sound that alienated music critics in the late 80s and early 90s has now become a staple of hyperpop, some of whose biggest practitioners—100 gecs comes to mind—have blatant stylistic similarities. In the world of what used to be called prog rock, an entire subculture of bands who got their start listening to Cardiacs have popped up: Black MIDI openly cites them, and it's hard to imagine that Black Country, New Road doesn't listen to them too. Goth music also borrows liberally from them: former Cardiacs members have toured with the Cure, and Edward Ka-Spel of the Legendary Pink Dots has paid tribute to Tim Smith as well. And while I'm not positive that Tim and Eric, two of the most influential voices in comedy filmmaking, were drawing directly from Cardiacs, there are so many aesthetic crossovers between the two—"Casey and his brother" in particular seems almost identical to Cardiacs' look from "Tarred and Feathered"—that the inspiration seems extraordinarily likely.
 
Beyond compositional techniques or performative methods, it's the mood of Cardiacs that's seeped increasingly into the mainstream. A recurring Cardiacs theme is the juxtaposition of the sheer mess and filth of life, of feeling, with the claustrophobic rigidity of social systems and routines and technology and machines. On the one hand, there's the terror of life's fleetingness, its fragility, the ease with which all good things can be shattered and maimed; and on the other, there's the anxious feeling that, to assimilate into the seeming "security" of society, to properly "fit in," you're not just suppressing a key part of yourself—you're becoming the cold, machinelike enforcer of this harsh, inhuman, unliving world, helping to inflict it upon others. It's the duality of these two images, and the tension between them, that's key: rebellion against an unfeeling society is nothing new, but the flip side of that is the sheer childlike terror of reckoning with what it means to be made out of dirt and bone and blood, what it means to be small and kickable, what it means to feel rage and lust and bitterness. The feeling, in other words, that if humans really are part of the natural world, then they belong to a realm of cruelty and violence and indifference, so horrifying and so potentially bleak and meaningless that it makes sense how we seek to build fortresses around one another. Maybe 9-to-5 jobs, fascism, and even war are more  comforting to us than what it would mean to truly break free.
 
Yet the message is never horror. With Cardiacs, the underlying theme is always, always one of joy, love, and tenderness—even delicacy. Perversely, subversively, Cardiacs' method is to embrace both sides of this duality: to embrace the dirt and stench and mortality of being alive, and to embrace what's regimented and mechanical and formal and ritualistic at the same time. They're the daisy growing in the sidewalk cracks. They're the tiny, beating heart somewhere in the machine. And if their music is brutal in two different ways at once—unflinchingly complex and unfailingly pulverizing—it's offered not as nihilistic mindlessness or pornographic violence but as a refutation of meaninglessness, of pointlessness, of fear, of the sort of shelter that costs you a part of your own life.

This is what it means to be alive, their music says. This, all of this, is a part of life. Let's make something beautiful with it.   

Once upon a time, some music critic somewhere attempted to classify Cardiacs with the hideous label "pronk." Prog-punk. All the noodling of progressive rock, and all the shoutiness of punk.

Tim and Cardiacs rejected that label. When asked, Tim simply described Cardiacs as a pop band. Sometimes he'd specify that they were psychedelic pop, but they were always, always pop.

And here's the thing about Cardiacs: once you get over the initial system shock of listening to them, you'll find that their songs are unbelievably catchy and beautiful and good. Their stuff gets in your system so deeply that it's not uncommon for people to find it hard to listen to other music, at least for a spell. All that complexity, all that daunting intricacy, is all in the service of melody—melody so strange and multifaceted and ambitious that you might just find yourself addicted to it. Because Cardiacs is pop music. However unusual their approach—and their approach boils down to "seek as unusual an approach as possible"—they never once lose sight of the fact that they're aiming for the simplest and most fundamental of musical joys.

If you're not terribly familiar with the classical world, you may not have much experience with the concept of melody as theme: melody that serves, not as a hook to sing along to, but as a musical idea of sorts that gets picked up and toyed with and turned into a vessel for other ideas, other feelings, other experiences. It makes for a different kind of listening experience: not a better one, necessarily, just an experience that takes you to different places than pop formats typically do. Catchy singalong music always existed too, mind you: there are folk songs and sea shanties and drinking tunes that have survived for hundreds—if not thousands—of years, precisely because they're a blast to chant with a crowd of happy, tipsy people. The rarefied world of composition emerged as a way for enthusiasts to share their ideas with one another, before recorded music made it far easier to document more sophisticated thoughts. It existed, not in opposition to more popular music methods, but as an extension of them, a conversation about them, a way of thinking through them. It, too, was intended to be accessible, approachable, and above all enjoyable. It just existed in another context, in the same way that film scores and video game soundtracks and EDM concerts exist in slightly different contexts from arena rock or radio pop, and therefore have different objectives, and different metrics of success.
 
Tim Smith is by all standards a composer. Not in any pretentious, high-falutin' sense: he was a self-taught musician and songwriter through-and-through, and had no designs to make "serious" music in any highbrow, snobby sense. From start to finish, he wrote pop music—songs that were meant to get people singing and dancing and chanting. But the sheet music thing was not an affectation: his music was planned, written out, architected, in an attempt to realize a vision. It's not pretense to say that he composed: that's just the accurate way to describe what he did.

He was also a songwriter and a producer. (A fantastic producer. Occasionally he'd produce work by other bands, and his productions immediately stand out: they have a depth and a whimsy and a color to them that immediately marks them as something special.) But Tim Smith was also a serious composer, one who was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music shortly before his death. His works are studied and analyzed for good reason.

And what did Tim compose? Pop music. Melodies. Riffs. Hooks. Bangers and bops. His shit, it's safe to say, frequently slapped.
 
The duality repeats itself, over and over, again and again. Yes, you can take Cardiacs music "seriously;" you can think about it endlessly, and it will continuously offer you new revelations and discoveries. But Cardiacs is pop. Cardiacs is a pop group. Cardiacs music is pop music. If Cardiacs is a great, meaningful, important band, that's because—first and foremost—Cardiacs writes pop music that puts all other pop music to shame.

If that doesn't make sense to you at first, if that doesn't sit quite right, just give it a second. Wait for the part of your brain that's trying to compartmentalize it—the part of your brain that's thinking too much, ironically—to admit defeat. You're not supposed to think too much about pop music, don't you know? And one of the delightful things you may realize, as you listen to Cardiacs, is how much you're thinking even when you tell yourself you're not thinking. You don't notice the rigidities of your own thought, the structures and limitations you've imposed upon yourself, the suppressions you abide by, until something brushes up against it. That can feel abrasive, not because the music itself is abrasive, but because you're so unused to being nudged in so many unfamiliar directions all at once. Maybe one unfamiliar direction one time, now and then, but not all of the directions, not so relentlessly, as if the point is not to shift you any one way but to get you to enjoy the sheer radical joy of movement, of possibility, of catchy tunes where you never thought catchiness could possibly exist.
 
After a decade and a half of "poptimism," after a sheer concentrated movement to get culture to take pop music "seriously," it's awfully strange how difficult we can find pop music sometimes, isn't it? But it makes sense. If pop music can't challenge and thwart you, if it can't offer you mysteries and wonders, if it can't get you to see the world in a radically new light, then what would be the point? If we really want to claim that pop music is meaningful, then we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that Cardiacs is really, really good pop music, no matter how odd it might strike us at first. If that's a difficult idea to swallow for a minute, perhaps that's the very thing that indicates just how worthwhile that idea. As famed pop producer Brian Eno once said, the thing that makes people remember both perfume and pop music is the stink.
 

A lot happens, in a generation. In 1999, the same year as Cardiacs' no-longer-final album Guns released, a young Craig Fortnam and Sharron Saddington released their first and only record under the name Shrubbies. Tim Smith produced it; his ex-wife Sarah performed on it. Later, in 2011, Fortnam recounted how irritating he found audiences at rock shows: "I thought, ‘I’ll write music that doesn’t have drums, that isn’t loud, and we’ll play places where people sit down and then they won’t talk.'" Shrubbies disbanded; North Sea Radio Orchestra began.

Fortnam became an acclaimed composer and guitarist; Sharron Sharron—now Sharron Fortnam—became just as acclaimed a vocalist, her style finding an uncanny blend between classical and pop deliveries. In 2025, both Fortnams made their first appearances on a Cardiacs album, this time as proper members of the band.

Kavus Torabi became Cardiacs' guitarist in 2003. He appears on their live double album The Special Garage Concerts, but never got a chance to show up on a Cardiacs studio LP. After Cardiacs' dissolution, he became one of the principal members of the legendary psychedelic band Gong, presiding over their first album released after the death of founding member Daevid Allen. His first studio release with Cardiacs didn't come until 22 years after he joined the group initially.

Replacing Tim Smith as lead vocalist on LSD is Mike Vennart, former frontman of the now-classic Oceansize. Mind you, Oceansize only formed in 1998, just a year before the release of Cardiacs' once-final album. Joining them is Rose Kemp, herself well-known on the English music scene, who was born seven years after Cardiacs first formed. The full LSD band is massive, incorporating two of the three vocalists from Sidi Bou Said (whose second album was produced by Smith), the tremendous composer James Larcombe (who got his start with North Sea Radio Orchestra), 90s American rock staple Rob Crow, a four-piece string quartet, and a five-piece brass section. Jim Smith, Tim's older brother, remains the band's bassist and longest-running member. While the bulk of the album's music was written by Smith before his death, Craig Fortnam is responsible for its orchestral arrangements.

There's a reason I'm getting into this in so much detail. LSD is many things. It's a posthumous tribute to Tim Smith, despite Smith surviving long enough to help complete most of the record himself. It's a throwback to another decade, a window to a past that never came to be. But it's also the fruit of Cardiacs' labor: a record completed by an entire generation of musicians and composers who followed Smith's lead, and his band's lead, and decided they wanted to make music differently than they usually heard it made. It's the byproduct of Tim Smith's astonishing inspiration, but also the byproduct of his astonishing generosity: for all that he composed Cardiacs' music himself, handing out sheet music to its other members, Smith was endlessly supportive and encouraging of others, pushing them to make music when they were uncertain of themselves, helping them complete work they didn't know how to complete themselves. Without that generosity, without that endless outpouring of love, LSD could never have been finished. This is not the work of disciples attempting to do justice to some great master: it's the work of some of the best musicians and composers of their generation, most of whom had a chance to become as phenomenal as they are because Tim saw them and loved them and cared about them. 

In some ways, this is not a Cardiacs album as Cardiacs albums used to be. In other ways, it is a kind of Cardiacs album that old Cardiacs albums simply couldn't have been. And—not to harp on the duality here—both halves of that feel distinctly like Cardiacs' reigning m.o. This album is not-at-all-metaphorically both a birth and a death: it is a life that continues on after its progenitor could not, at once a reflection and a transformation of his artistry. It is Tim Smith, and it is not Tim Smith. It could not be anybody but him; it cannot possibly be him; and both these things are what Tim Smith was and is and will always be.

Let's start with this unavoidable irony: the parts of this album that are not Tim Smith make it Cardiacs' most accessible album by a mile. The production is warmer, cleaner, and less fey. The band is altogether smoother, more polished, with fewer jagged edges; it's hard to tell whether that's thanks to a couple decades' extra practice or whether the band mellowed with age or whether Smith's distinctive agitation was just not replicable. Certainly the vocals are more overtly melodic, less harsh, than Tim's voice was. Even when they use legacy recordings of his voice, it's blended with the new singers in ways that produce more obvious harmoniousness. 

It's ironic, too, that this accessibility and pleasantness is the one thing that leaves me wondering whether LSD is a notch less magical than all the rest. I don't mean that in any kind of snooty hipster way: I'm a musical hedonist who very much enjoys lazy, easy pleasures, and I've been listening to LSD on repeat in a way that I always struggled to do with earlier Cardiacs albums. But a week after LSD's release, I found myself relistening to Come Back Clammy Lammy, off the album Guns—itself sometimes dinged by fans for being simpler and more accessible than earlier Cardiacs albums. I was struck by the aggressive guitar flanging, the fluttery synth arpeggios that sprinkle themselves all over, the strangely tinny horns: struck, in other words, by the way that every production choice is such a choice, adding new unusual layers to what's already a very unusual song. LSD is a phenomenally lush and well-produced album, and it feels odd to wonder whether this is a knock against it, but... by Cardiacs standards, it may well be.

The counterpoint to that argument, however, is that there are aspects of LSD which simply could not have been accomplished two decades ago, and we have proof of that. In 2007, Cardiacs released the single Ditzy Scene as an advance single of their upcoming album; in 2025, Cardiacs re-released Ditzy Scene in its finished album form. You can certainly argue that the original single has some sparkle to its production that the album version lacks. But that doesn't change the fact that the album version is a radically different song, not least of which because it now features an elaborate brass orchestration by Craig Fortnam that winds around the original composition, intricately and playfully supporting and contrasting it in equal measure. Ditzy Scene's two-minute-long guitar intro used to feel sparse, atmospheric, mysterious, but a little empty; that intro now bursts with glorious new colors, taking what was already deeply unusual and finding ways to make it more unusual still. 

Fortnam's style as a composer isn't Smith's, but it harbors the same aims and ambitions, and holds the same values dear. His presence doesn't undercut Smith: it accentuates it, complements it, continues the conversation. When the song's core melody kicks in, it's telling how Fortnam's brass arrangement shifts, changing from a swirling counterpart to added bombast. The two halves of the arrangement come together at the solo, horns and choir and guitar combining to sound like the last trump, heavenly and regal and defiant and badass all at once. Whatever might have gotten lost in Cardiacs' need for a new producer has, at the very least, been somewhat regained in the new additions to the band—additions that were only possible because Fortnam, along with half a dozen other contributors, got an extra twenty years to develop his chops before the album's final release.

Then there's the music itself—and holy shit, what music. It's not just that a song like Lovely Eyes makes it immediately clear that Tim Smith is an absolutely inimitable songwriter—who else can write a song that thrashes that hard while maintaining such a catchy piano riff over the top? It's that moment, partway through, where the thrashing gives way to a string section, of all things, performing a soft reset that only makes the subsequent guitar solo hit that much harder. (And when the strings kick in again over the solo, it demonstrates again what an invaluable addition Fortnam is to the mix.) The song is such a start-to-end rush that you might not even notice just how much happens in it, just how many sections it has, and just how cleverly it sustains its own energy, shifting to new ideas just as the old ones are losing wind.

Or listen to thirty seconds of Downup, which the band released as LSD's second single. Yes, there are other songwriters who can write that many twists into that short a space of music—but how many of those composers would write it all into a melody? I love the fuck out of some Mr. Bungle, but Mr. Bungle startles in its compositions more than in its melodies; only Cardiacs writes a melodic hook that shifts through that many keys just in the name of being a ditty. (And that's to say nothing of how, halfway through, the melody doubles back on itself and becomes even more dizzyingly twisted.) Very few songwriters know how to be either as unpredictable or as pleasurable as Tim Smith; none of them, come as close to being both at once.

Once or twice an album, Cardiacs release a song that comes perilously close to sounding like a straightforward catchy tune, no strings attached; I, predictably, love all of these songs dearly. LSD has a few contenders here—Volob has an addictive pulse to it, and briefly threatens to be Cardiacs' first-ever synthpop track, before it morphs into something weirder and catchier—but The Blue and Buff might just be the catchiest song Tim Smith ever wrote, and that's saying something. Has Cardiacs ever sounded this Beatles-y before, or this similar to the Kinks? The sheer poppiness of the melody and the guitar riff, however, only underscore just how delightful Smith's deviations from the norm are: not just how hard the drums go, even when the rest of the song chooses to stay soft, but the instrumental bridge whose notes defy easily-classifiable meter, and the final glorious eruption of sound that pushes the song to places that pop like this rarely ever goes.

Then there are the two heavy hitters—the longform tracks around which the rest of the album coalesces. Busty Beez is one of the bands' only-ever instrumentals, and it's a doozy, clocking in at nine minutes exactly. In some ways it sounds a lot like the music of Spratleys, one of Smith's side projects, but with a fuller band behind it. It reaches higher, though, as rising and rising through layers of cloud until a voice bursts through from the other side. Or perhaps it's not heavenly. Perhaps it's the music they'd pipe into a rickety old amusement park, long since abandoned, the paint curling off of wooden horses on the carousel, rust creeping up what remains of the ferris wheel. This, too, is part of Cardiacs' magic: that sometimes they sound genuinely otherworldly and fey, and other times they sound like the rinky-dink, shallow faux-wonder of carnivals and circuses and theme parks, the things that stop feeling magical after childhood. Sometimes, the dragons are real; other times the dragons are splintery messes that would've failed a safety inspection had the while affair not gone bankrupt after about eight months. (But sometimes, they really are real.)

Skating, on the other hand, might be the most batshit composition Tim ever wrote. Each section of it standalone is a contender for some of Cardiacs' wildest music, but the way they work as a whole is a little mind-melting. If you're the kind of person who enjoys the sheer exhilaration of a song constantly upending you, you're going to find no end of delight here... and if you struggle when a song eludes your attempts to wrap your head around it, I'd point to this as a prime example about how Smith's meticulousness as a composer leads to something that feels more chaotic than actual chaos would feel. There's a careful, crafty thoughtfulness to exactly how its patterns continually shift right as you think you've got your finger on them: it's playfully, almost prankishly, giving you the runaround. Smith had years, after all, to perfect something that you're processing in a matter of minutes—it's hard to fathom just how much intent went into a work like this when you're experiencing it in real time. If Philip Glass wrote surf rock, he might have written something almost like "Skating"—but even that undermines just how much is going on here, and I doubt that I myself have enough of a grasp on it to do more than just point to it and say "Wow."

It says something about just how impossibly high the bar Cardiacs have set for themselves is that my doubts about LSD's production still stand. "Skating" is in the running for Cardiacs' strangest and most wondrous composition, which means it's easily one of the strangest and most wondrous compositions any band (or any contemporary classical group) has ever put out. "Ditzy Scene" comes in close behind. The album as a whole is tremendously catchy, tremendously high-energy, tremendously pleasurable. "If this were a release by any other band..." I'd start, if any other band was capable of an album of this magnitude, but that's just it: no other band is. Since I first heard it, I've casually called Sing to God the greatest album I've ever heard, not out of some kind of fannish zealotry, but because it simply does more and goes further than anything else I've discovered—and I go out of my way to explore as much as I can, and as many kinds of things as I can, in part because Cardiacs made me crave music that did things no other music could. Sure, I can construct a dozen different arguments for other records, other performers, according to other metrics of "great." I construct them, I think about them, and then I come back to Cardiacs, not out of obligation but because they're something extraordinary and rare, even by the standards of extraordinary and rare music.

On first listen, I wondered whether LSD might be a match for Sing to God—and the fact that it even left me wondering that says volumes about how incredible it is. If you haven't fallen down this rabbithole, if you're not some connoisseur of this esoteric band, that statement probably won't mean much to you, and I'm not sure exactly how to explain why that's such a big thing to say, or why it might matter to you, even if you're wholly unfamiliar with this group. On the one hand, taste is subjective, different people are moved by different things, and it would be folly to act like my favorite band is somehow more objectively a big deal than everybody else's favorite band. On the other hand... there is something here, something measurably, definitively here, that I can promise you is at the very least worth seeking out. Worth even, I'd say, sitting with for a minute, and then maybe revisiting, just to see if a bud of something sprouts from that seed, and starts breaking its way through to the surface.

You don't have to know the history here. You don't have to be a fan of whatever you perceive "this kind of music" to be. (Though the more you listen, the more I think you'll agree with me that there really isn't any kind of music like this.) It's pop music, after all: it says what it says very simply, so long as you let yourself hear it.
 
You don't need to know what happened to Tim Smith to hear the feeling, the sorrow, the love, the letting-go of grief, in Pet Fezant, the album closer. You don't need to know that Smith was paralyzed and hospitalized for over a decade, the rest of his bandmates and friends putting on concerts to raise funds for his medical care. You don't need to think too hard about how Smith, despite being virtually unable to move, helped supervise LSD's completion, members of the band working with him across agonizingly slow years to help him realize his vision for the finished record. You don't need to know that the lyrics to "Pet Fezant" was written by his partner, Emily Jones, in memoriam, the finishing touch that Tim himself could have never provided:

It's like any pop music. Any music, really. Just listen to it, and it's there.


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¹ Okay, there's one exception. One. But I'll save that for a separate, much longer essay.