Cardiff quintet Panic Shack return with their first new music since the release of their self-titled debut album, which landed in July 2025 via Brace Yourself Records and saw the band achieve a Top 40 album in the UK. It comes in the guise of a fizzy punk barnstormer ‘grin & bear it’ and arrives on the eve of the group’s first-ever North American headline tour.
‘grin & bear it,’ almost appeared on last year’s Panic Shack LP and finds the band linking up with producer Ross Orton (Arctic Monkeys, Amyl & the Sniffers, Yard Act) for a maelstrom of blazing, beefy guitars and righteous fury as vocalist Sarah Harvey tears apart the rat race cribbing from lyrics scribbled on a scrap of paper during a long, lonely nightshift in 2023.
“This song has had many iterations, seen many a practice room and taken many forms,” explain the band, completed by Meg Fretwell, Romi Lawrence, Emily Smith, and Nick Doherty-Williams. “It’s a song that we’ve felt really passionate about getting right, but the music was never fully hitting. We reworked it from the start of the year in any spare time we had around working our jobs and gigging (as we almost always do), which really helped to emphasise the song’s meaning. It almost made it onto our debut album, but it just wasn’t where it needed to be; we felt it didn’t have enough grit – until now. We really clicked with Ross in the studio and are super proud of what the track has become; it sounds massive.”
The track is joined by an accompanying video, shot during Panic Shack’s recent headline German tour, that perfectly captures the chaos and camaraderie the band have wrought in the wake of their debut album last year, and will continue to bring across the UK, Europe, and North America this summer.
“We took this to another level when recording the video. Went full method,” they say. “The whole video is filmed and directed by us while on our recent tour in Germany. We left no graffiti’d wall un-lip synced in front of, no green room relaxed in, every cool monument photo op used as a backdrop, it was work work work, grind grind grind… but of course we had a blast doing it.”
