Hotel Lux – The Bitter Cup: Album Review

Live4ever 11 November, 2025

Artwork for Hotel Lux's album The Bitter Cup

3.5 starsss

Hotel Lux have made a second album that would delight the indie scene’s original provocateurs, with a disregard for the algorithmic nature of the modern game.

David Cavanagh’s book The Creation Records Story will tell you, although it isn’t the first and won’t be the last.

Dismissed out of hand by former label supremo Alan McGee as, ‘The accountant’s version’, it pinpoints the moment thirty-five years ago when both independent labels and the concept of ‘indie’ music itself essentially ceased to exist.

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The reasons were many, but the villains were the same: the major labels who took over the market by a combination of stealth and money at the beginning of the nineties.

Overnight, the principles on which those who valued creativity first were compromised, followed not long after by the likes of Rough Trade, Factory and indeed Creation itself.

Doing it for the kids, as McGee had once claimed self-righteously, was yesterday’s news.

The reason this is important is that you can trace a straight line between the decline of artist freedom which began then to the techbro hegemony of now, such that if you’re a musician without a second or possibly third job you start to arouse trust fund suspicions amongst your peers.

It’s also contextual here because, self-releasing, Hotel Lux as a band have made a second album that you sense would delight some of the indie scene’s original provocateurs, one with a lack of conformity, melding together influences and with seemingly a collective disregard for the algorithmic nature of the modern game.

So, who are these throwback mavericks? Originally from Hampshire but having gravitated to London, they’re a quintet fronted by singer/writer Lewis Duffin.

On arrival, they assimilated themselves into a scene which centred around the Windmill in Brixton and whose original products were the likes of Shame, Fat White Family and Goat Girl.

Having released their first single Envoi in 2017 and debut album Hands Across The Creek two years ago, The Bitter Cup finds Hotel Lux looking collectively into the mirror, handling production duties and relying on instinct – the attitude, as guitarist Max Oliver points out: ‘If you can’t trust yourselves, who can you?’

The Bitter Cup opens at the end; Encore finds Duffin sounding ragged and disillusioned, the pot-holed post punk tones threatening to unravel before giving way to a listless interlude before a round-shouldered finish.

A song waiting for a tune to break out, the effect is hard to describe unless you can sonically imagine Pete Doherty fronting an undisciplined version of The Fall doing a soundcheck. If that makes sense.

Some of The Bitter Cup indirectly, it seems, is informed by the stark economic reality of making music, Hotel Lux recording everything in just four days, their cover of the Billy Childish written title-track done in two takes.

Elsewhere, the mutant pub rock of The Fear takes a sideways look at addiction’s inner monologue, whilst the dirge like Another One Gone is a raw and uncompromising study of male mental health and suicide.

In amongst tales of damage are left turns into dead ended surprises; Nod (To The Retrospect) is a clattering, Pogues-esque love letter to the past, but it’s the Western-tinged Song For John Healy’s reprise of the alcoholic turned chess master’s life that satisfies most, the rusty prose highlighting Duffin’s gift for storytelling.

It’s hard to know exactly though what he and his comrades were trying to achieve with The Bitter Cup.

The results are certainly a cohesive work, in the sense that rarely if ever is the listener allowed to settle. Forty years ago, when anything indie went, it would’ve gained column inches by the meter.

Now it just poses far more questions than it answers.

Andy Peterson

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Tags:andy peterson, Hotel Lux