Cry Club's ‘Retaliate’ and Announce New Album 'High Voltage Anxiety'
By the time Cry Club’s new single 'Retaliate' hits its first chorus, you’re already in the thick of it, the track arrives as the second taste of their newly announced third album 'High Voltage Anxiety', dropping March 27, 2026, and marks a milestone moment for the duo. For the first time, vocalist Heather Riley and guitarist Jonathon Tooke have taken full control of the process, writing, producing, engineering, and essentially bottling the chaos themselves.
With 'Retaliate' Heather describes the song as
“A torch and pitchfork party soundtrack”
which somehow manages to undersell just how sharply it cuts. The band turn the cost of living crisis and widening wealth divide into a battle cry, spitting lines like
“Nothing’s a risk if you’re rich!”
over relentless, serrated production. It’s furious, yes, but it’s focused. And it’s fun in that cathartic, scream in your car way Cry Club have quietly mastered.
Thematically, it sits comfortably beside earlier singles 'High Voltage Anxiety' and 'This, Forever' both of which wrestle with digital burnout, apathy, and the slow creeping dread of living in a world where the news cycle feels like a frayed electrical wire. But this time, instead of just naming the tension, they’re sprinting full tilt away from it. Or maybe straight through.
Heather explains the record as an attempt to
“Navigate what it means to hold onto hope in a clenched fist”
That feeling courses through every corner of 'Retaliate', righteous anger, sure, but also a deep, almost vulnerable insistence that things can be better, that love for the world is reason enough to demand more from the people messing it up.
Jonathon, meanwhile, frames the album’s sound as "industrial pop” fusing the band’s punk and industrial intensity with the pop structures they swear by. If their 2020 debut 'God I’m Such a Mess' was post punk dressed up as bubblegum, and 2023’s 'Spite Will Save Me' was a love letter to their rock infused adolescence, 'High Voltage Anxiety' has a feeling like the moment they stop looking back and build the machine themselves.
It’s a machine that’s already been stress-tested on the road. Over the past 18 months, Cry Club have taken their theatrics international, tearing through Europe, joining The Darkness on their Australian run, and continuing to be the band other bands want to tour with WAAX and Stand Atlantic included. Their stream counts have soared past 2.5 million on Spotify alone, but more importantly, Cry Club have become one of those rare acts who sound unmistakably like themselves.
'Retaliate' is bold, abrasive, danceable, and deeply human, the kind of track that makes you want to flip a politician’s desk and then hug your best friend afterwards.