TICKLES - SUGAR & PLASTIC PLATES REVIEW
- The Joker
- Nov 25, 2025
- 8 min read
RELEASE DATE - NOV 28TH
There's something ironically twisted about a band called Tickles
releasing music that would be like waterboarding with broken glass and
birthday cake frosting. The Dordogne-born Nantes quartet of noise
Machine-punk have devoted the lion's share of seven years to an
observed approach of controlled chaos—two EPs into a career based on
making Idles sound so elevator-music-esque—and now they've put out
Sugar & Plastic Plates, a first full-length that's exactly like its name:
half an inch of Sickening sugar on the top, weaponized crockery
underneath.
This is music for the people who think therapy is too expensive but
screaming into the void doesn't cost a dime. Nine tracks of post-
apocalyptic rittage and thudding bass that address isolation, neurosis,
abandonment, and childhood trauma with roughly as much finesse as
breaking it through the window with a brick. Which is to say: it works.
Lead single "The Safest Car" is a teaser—a heavy post-punk battering
about the existential terror of moving out of your comfort zone, which,
come on, is the most universally in-touch-with-fear thing in 2025 other
than looking at your bank account or reading the news. It's four
Frenchmen collectively deciding, if they're gonna lose it, might as well do
it at 140 BPM with all the fuzz. The track thumps on that strangely
modern complacency: the knowledge that safety is a trap, but outside life
is really scary, so maybe we'll just stay here in this burning room because
at least it's our burning room.
Singer Lucas Bonfils attacks his lines with the frantic urgency of
someone who's read too much Camus and not enough self-help, just the
energy this scene needs. His voice swerves between desperate wail and
mocking sneer, never really settling if he's the joke or the punchline.
Again: point made.
But then Tickles ends up diverging from the never-ending procession of
bands appropriating working-class British rage bands: they're genuinely
funny. Not winking, nudge-nudge funny, but in that blackly absurdist style
where you come to see the joke and the terror are identical. An EP
entitled 'Ticklesticklesticklesticklesticklestickles'? Either a stroke of
genius or a shock. Maybe both. It's the kind of move that suggests a band
wholly uninterested in being serious but very serious about making music
—a tightrope most bands attempt and then face-plant into.
It was tracked with Christophe Hogommat, whose surname is name-
resembling a French cartoon name but appears to have a good grip on
getting noise sounding thought-out, and subsequently mixed by Joris
Saïdani and mastered by Thibault Chaumont. The production credentials
are respectable if you're the type of person able to tell you, hey, I know
who Birds in Row are (you should) and, well, it pays off: this album is
both titanic and suffocating, like trapped in an exceedingly expensive
tomb.
Bonfils reports that it was a cinch to work with Hogommat "effortlessly,"
which is the kind of thing that makes you wonder what hard is for a
group whose default position is seeming sound chaos. They worked
tirelessly over these nine tracks, so it appears, having "exactly what they
wanted"—which just so happens to be noise, otherworldly sounds,
techno-appropriate textures, and the general ambiance of a panic attack
on a disco beat. The collaboration allowed them to "play around freely"
and "push every tune to its limits and preserve its center," which is
producer slang for "we broke everything and then re-glued it all together
carefully so that it looks intentional."
The result is an album that chronicles Tickles' "new incarnation"—a
description that suggests their previous incarnation wasn't feisty enough
already, something which should be disturbing in itself. Each of the
tracks on Sugar & Plastic Plates seems constructed to sound utterly
lawless, which is a paradox only made plausible if everyone involved has
a perfect understanding of what they're doing. This's not random garage-
band chaos; it's controlled demolition work by pros.
Lead singer Lucas Bonfils describes how the album title has to do with
"the bittersweet feeling of birthdays, moments full of joy, yet sometimes
tinged with solitude as connections slowly fade and loneliness quietly
settles in." Jesus Christ, Lucas. Who hurt you? (Don't answer that—I think
the entire album does.) It's a powerful image: the forced party, the
dividends on investment of adulthood shrinking, the manner in which
birthdays evolve from genuine moments of pleasure into annual
reminders of loneliness and mortality. The artwork on the cover appears
to reinforce this image, though one can imagine that it must be difficult
to picture "the slow death of meaningful human connection" without
resorting to merely photographing a dinner at home.
This thematic line—childhood trauma, abandonment, the insidious feeling
that you're really on your own in an meaningless world—could easily
descend into self-pitying drivel in lesser hands. But Tickles have the
intelligence to buried their existential hopelessness under enough
distortion and rhythmic fury that you can mosh your way through your
own meltdown. It's therapy that you can stage-dive through, which is
likely more effective than real therapy and cheaper, to boot.
Their current single "Daughters Around" speaks to family dynamics
and gender roles in the form of what Bonfils calls music "heavy but
flavored with disco," either the best or worst description of a genre I've
ever read. The song breaks down the gendered division of household
work with a precision that would make a sociologist weep: "While the
father goes to work, the son fights, and the mother struggles, the
daughters hang around, a sign of both weakness and gentleness."
It's a nod to the strength of daughters—those "symbols of both
gentleness and fragility" upon whom "the balance of our relationships
truly rests"—executed via the sound equivalent of a Molotov cocktail
thrown at a mirror ball. The disco elements aren't presented ironically;
they're armed, made danceable and atrociously clumsy. It's the rhythm of
a party you're stuck in, with everyone smiling but no one happy, and the
beat just keeps going because if it didn't you'd have questioned what's
actually happening.
The genius of the song is that it never gives anyone a free pass. The
daughters "stay around," which could be passive, but Bonfils flips it: this
isn't passivity but determination, the unseen work of holding shit
together as everyone else gets to do more theatrical roles. It's a quietly
subversive statement masked in enough noise that you can ignore it if
you don't listen—something that is probably how the daughters feel, too.
Nantes has long punched above its weight on France's punk underground
—from Elmer Food Beat to Mad Foxes—and the Tickles are continuing
the distinguished tradition of creating music that's both cathartic and
catastrophic. There's something in the water there, it appears, or
something in the air that leads individuals to desire to turn guitars into
weapons of percussive attack. Its punk tradition is deeply French:
political yet not preachy, absurdist yet not flippant, furious yet not
macho.
Tickles fit comfortably into this tradition and push it somewhere darker
and more psychologically invasive. While previous generations of Nantes
punks might have been fired at political systems or social structures,
Tickles are unearthing internal wreckage—the damage done by families,
relationships, and the broad grind terror of late capitalism's
psychological load. It's punk inward-looking, which is no less political but
much harder to endure.
The unavoidable comparisons to Idles, Fontaines D.C., and METZ are
not unjustified, but also partially beside the point. Indeed, Tickles trade
in the same sort of post-punk fury and noise-rock viciousness that's been
the aural backdrop for British and Irish cultural deterioration over the
last decade. Indeed, they share that same proportion of working-class
anger and middle-class anger that gets middle-class music writers (hello)
momentarily threat-worthy.
But Tickles bring a certain French sensibility to the model—some
absurdist philosophy, literary bleakness, an acknowledgement that void is
not so much to be gotten angry with but to be learned about, worked
over, maybe even to be laughed at in that grim way you laugh when
shrieking eternally is not on the menu. They're not trying to out-Brit the
Brits; they're projecting the same neuroses through a different cultural
lens, one that's absorbed more existentialist philosophy and therefore is
even more sure that everything doesn't matter, which paradoxically
makes the music matter more.
The METZ comparisons are maybe best placed in terms of sheer sonic
architecture—that same commitment to having every note sound like
structural collapse, that same knowledge that occasionally the most
truthful reply to modern life is simply more. More loudness, more
distortion, more anarchy. But whereas METZ might sound almost clinical
in their precision, Tickles are messier, more human, more willing to let
the seams show.
They're signed to A Tant Rêver du Roi and Stolen Body Records
currently; that is, someone with actual money thinks this controlled
demolition is bank-worthy. Stolen Body, in particular, have built a
reputation around booking acts that sit within the broad category of
garage rock, post-punk, and "what the fuck was that"—that sort of tag
that acknowledges there is an audience for music that can leave you
feeling like you're under attack but happily so.
The dual-label French/UK strategy is smart placement. It gets them a
foothold in both nations without needing to commit to one as the lead
market, and it acknowledges that this kind of music—all noisy and
thinking and abrasive and weirdly danceable—has fans on both sides of
the Channel who share the disillusionment and are equally ready to flail
about it.
The twist is, all the noise and fury and techno-bred sonic anguish (why
not include techno in your noise-rock album about childhood traumas,
anyway?) aside, Sugar & Plastic Plates is desperately, uncomfortably
sincere. These are not snarling sweatpants-wearing hecklers hurling
grenades from a safe distance. This is a band actually struggling with
stupidity and pain in modern life, hammering riff by hammering riff.
There's no ironic shield of protection here, no separation between band
and material. They're immersed, and they are taking that wheel,
lighting it on fire, and sending it rolling down a hill into a birthday party
for kids, which seems truer to the time in some way. In a world where
every band sounds like they're auditioning for a Peaky Blinders theme,
where "authenticity" is just another fashion trend, where even revolution
is precisely packaged and algorithmically dropped, there's something
pleasant about four Frenchmen who have decided the best reaction to
existential dread is extreme sound and no fucks.
Sugar & Plastic Plates doesn't offer answers. It doesn't pretend that
making noise will fix what's broken, individually or collectively. What it
gives is validation—that indeed it's all terrible, and indeed you're
probably irreparably harmed, and indeed birthdays during childhood did
scar you, and indeed family life is a landmine of unspoken
anger and resentments, and indeed stepping outside your comfort zone is
terrifying, and indeed you will end up alone one day in spite of your best
endeavors.
But first, let's scream about it together. We can turn it up loud enough to
bleed in our ears. We can dance on the graves at our own funeral. We can
turn something beautiful out of the burning wreckage, even if that beauty
looks like destruction to everyone else.
That's what Tickles get that so many of their peers don't: catharsis isn't
transcendence or transformation or any other optimistic bullshit.
Sometimes catharsis is simply the recognition of how fucked everything
is and creating enough noise that you can't hear yourself think about it
for thirty-seven minutes.
Sugar & Plastic Plates releases November 28th. Bring earplugs. Bring
tissues. Bring your unresolved childhood issues. Bring that tower of stale
birthday cards from relatives you no longer hear from. Bring all those
awkward family dinners you've ever endured. Bring your fear of leaving
the house, your horror of remaining at home, your sense of certainty
you've made the wrong choice at every conceivable turn.
Tickles will find you right where you are—and then they'll ignite that
spot and burn it to the ground. And perhaps, hopefully, to watch it go up
in flames might be something akin to liberty.
7.5/10
Would recommend to: cathartic shrieking fans, birthday trauma, the
French, disco beats applied as psychological warfare, families that kill
you slowly, sound as spiritual practice, laughing rather than crying
because crying will be too time-consuming, and creeping dread that the
safest car will still crush.
Not for: punk snobs who think that the height of the genre was the
Clash, anyone seeking "good vibes," your parents, !rst dates, or people
who describe music as "chill."
You ought to listen to: "The Safest Car," "Daughters Around," and
probably seven other exercises infinite anarchy with which we'll all be
singing along and pretending we're okay.
