Cassius Wolf & Das Abs have been here before, they just never got the chance to be heard properly the first time. Formed in Liverpool in 1978 by Cassius Wolf and Don Watson, two school friends who came up working at the legendary club Eric’s and absorbed the city’s post-punk energy firsthand, the project is finally delivering its debut album ‘An Afternoon in Bedlam’, due May 29, 2026, built from carefully restored cassette recordings reimagined with contemporary tools.
New single “The Sound of the Guns” is the clearest statement yet of what this album is reaching for. Rooted in a punk-reggae rhythm that carries the lineage of The Clash, the track confronts the human cost of conflict with a directness that feels as urgent now as it would have in 1982. Originally written in the early 1980s and co-written with Liverpool musician John McGlone of Western Promise, it’s been reworked from archive recordings without losing the rawness that made it matter in the first place. Cassius puts it plainly: “It’s a powerful anti-war statement that asks you to consider the plight of innocent civilians caught up in conflicts everywhere.”
Alongside earlier single “I Can’t Reply”, the two tracks map out an album that moves between intimate emotional breakdown and wider social reckoning. The band draws from the darker romantic textures of The Cure and Depeche Mode, the experimental mindset of Can and The Velvet Underground, and the punk attitude that shaped everything they heard coming out of Liverpool in their formative years. It’s a sound rooted in a specific time and place that refuses to stay there.
Wolf and Watson retain full creative control across songwriting, production, and visual presentation, recording from a home studio environment and embracing new technology as a preservation tool rather than a shortcut. Their return also carries a wider message, part of what they call “PCore”, a movement celebrating artists who continue pursuing creative ambitions later in life, on their own terms and without apology.