Henry Cow… aehm: Now - Then Again (2026)

 

Henry Now – Then Again (2026)

Some reunions are nostalgia tours. This is not that. This is four men who helped blow up the blueprint in the ’70s walking back into the room, surveying the rubble, and deciding to build something stranger on top of it.

Chris Cutler, Fred Frith, John Greaves, and Tim Hodgkinson, yes, those four, don’t resurrect Henry Cow. They mutate it. One letter shifts and suddenly it’s Henry Now, a name that feels less like a pun and more like a manifesto: this is not then, this is now, and if you came looking for “Living in the Heart of the Beast – Part II,” you took the wrong exit.

Recorded live on November 18, 2022, and later sculpted in the studio by Frith into distinct CD and LP mixes, Then Again is over an hour of improvisation carved into seven movements that feel less like “tracks” and more like tectonic plates softly grinding against each other. The sound is more spacious than the old days, less serrated frenzy, more air between the molecules, but don’t mistake space for comfort. This is chamber music for people who distrust chambers.

The music unfolds like a slow-breathing, multicellular organism. Rhythms align, then splinter into counterpoint. A bass line might murmur something almost tender before Hodgkinson’s reeds slice through it like a free jazz telegram from a parallel universe. Cutler doesn’t “keep time”; he interrogates it. Frith threads guitar lines that hover somewhere between classical poise and scrapyard poetry. It’s abstract, yes, but lucid in its own sideways logic.

There are no bombastic climaxes. No cheap crescendos engineered to make you feel like you’ve “arrived.” Instead, the band builds through accretion, ideas surfacing, mutating, dissolving, reappearing in altered form. At times it feels like a soundtrack to a David Lynch neo-noir film that doesn’t exist yet: low-tempo, episodic, cinematic, always in motion. The four communicate without glances, without theatrical cues. The empathy is surgical. The restraint is ferocious.

Cool and almost austere on the surface, but with a sly glint in the ragged machinery beneath, they’re not proving they still can, they’re proving they never stopped. Then Again is mature and occasionally forbidding, offering no explanations and no pandering, just the quiet demand that you listen closely and meet it halfway.

This one’s not for the dabblers or the playlist grazers, it’s for the obsessives, the sonic spelunkers willing to crawl through the caverns of clang and counterpoint until that strange, splintered beauty starts glowing back at them from inside the machinery. So don’t come here for hooks you can hum in the shower or riffs to blast from a passing Camaro. Come here if you’re willing to sit in the dark while four lifers redraw a surreal map in real time, chiseling fleeting, fragile, discordant beauty out of friction and air. Then Again doesn’t seduce you, it tests you, dares you, waits for you to lean in. And if you do, if you surrender to the crooked logic of their interplay, you might just hear something rare: not a comeback, not a victory lap, but the sound of restless minds still kicking against the edges of the possible.

Lineup: 

Chris Cutler - drums, percussion

Fred Frith - guitar, piano

John Greaves - bass guitar, vocals

Tim Hodgkinson - clarinet, lap steel