When the three-piece from the Isle of Wight dropped their debut during the pandemic lockdown in 2020, there was no need for any elaborate introduction. The Appalled came through as concise and direct without much fuss, offering their listeners a clear representation of how life goes in the absence of anything to fall back on. Regrettable, tenacious, and yet still standing, the band managed to create their self-titled debut album five years ago. In 2025, a vinyl edition has been released by Street Rats Records.
Their debut is full of the themes that don't require explanations since the band was singing about their life, not about anything they might want to invent. Sounding tired of relationships that went bad or of life that could be seen as freer then but now seems to leave a bit of bitterness after all. The phrase which became the slogan for the album (No Wife No Kids No Mortgage) turned out to become the motto of life where you live with a sense of defiance that in reality is the cause of regret.
In other songs, there was the similar feeling of the mixture between the feeling of pride and realization that pride does not fill the empty space of your heart. The album does not sound too pessimistic and gloomy because of its brevity, directness of the delivery and local humor of those lads.
The 2025 Street Rats pressing is built from the 2020 sessions, it places the original eight songs in a format that treats them as something worth holding onto. Both the 2020 recordings and this 2025 vinyl sound like a statement of intent.
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