The Cribs – Selling A Vibe: Album Review

Live4ever 6 January, 2026

Artwork for The Cribs album Selling A Vibe

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The Cribs’ new album is rooted in family, a tacit acceptance that the Jarmans have never acknowledged they are a band made up of brothers.

This particular correspondent grew up in a close relationship with three brothers – twins and an older sibling.

Whenever one of the regular familial bust-ups occurred, the latter was always the one who maintained that no matter what the permutations for any given situation were, somebody was always the odd one out.

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That shouldn’t have really mattered for the Jarmans, the trio who make up The Cribs – twins Ryan and Gary accompanied by brother Ross.

Since their eponymous 2004 debut they’ve collectively raised the bar for music from the north; a DIY, grassroots aesthetic holding it to account.

That was until the point of releasing 2017’s 24-7 Rock Star Shit, after which legal issues took them off the road and kept them out of the studio.

Having finally regained control of their music after an 18-month struggle, its successor Night Network gathered a fistful of good reviews, but being unable to tour it led to some proper soul searching.

Selling A Vibe, in a sense, is the end of journey which arguably began almost a decade ago.

Separated by thousands of miles of ocean and continent (Gary lives in Portland, Ryan in New York and Ross still resides in their home city of Wakefield), the pause in writing and recording turned into something deliberate.

To cement this unofficial hiatus the twins took time out to hang together, not thinking about making music (although the album’s signature track Brothers Won’t Break would eventually come out of this time as a by-product), reflecting that there was nothing much left for them to prove to either themselves or the industry.

That liberated mindset was the basis for a record with much conceptual freedom.

Its precepts, Ryan says, is, ‘rooted in family’, a tacit acceptance that the Jarmans have never acknowledged they are a band made up of brothers rather than to that point simply thinking the reverse.

This made some of the subject matter harder to nail down, most especially with Looking For The Wrong Guy, Ryan’s deeply personal lyrics, one he thought twice about sharing.

The result places the spotlight on him, a comparatively skeletal arrangement and the refrain, ‘I’m just wasting away/Watching the time go by’, seemingly an admission of old ways and broken promises.

Other opportunities to push themselves came in the form of hiring Patrick Wimberley as producer, a deliberate attempt to lean into the band’s unique version of pop music.

This manifests on the likes of Summer Seizures, a song that bears their familiar lo-fi qualities but is equally unafraid to use hooks, light and shade.

This isn’t a new Cribs – after two decades they were astute enough to know they weren’t broken so didn’t need to fix anything – but opener Dark Luck and the title-track are full of the rock n’ roll swagger you once feared they’d lost.

At Selling A Vibe’s heart are the three tracks which are from very different perspectives; Self Respect feels like former member Johnny Marr is at its guitar edges, potentially intended for Louis Tomlinson; Never the Same is an indie anthem that even in the depths of winter promises some sweaty festival joy.

It’s the closing Brothers Won’t Break though that forms a meaningful pivot; a drifting, warmly held finale that signs up and signs off a bond re-cemented.

A brother once told me that with a three there’s always an odd one out. That’s not the evidence presented by Selling A Vibe, a collection of songs that does all the hard stuff and still comes out smiling on the other side.

Andy Peterson

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