Unabated guitar energy and Manchester’s most engaging, crowd-mingling front man meets the forgotten histories and uneasy myths of the East Anglian fens as the city’s fun-punks, HUNGRY return with new single, Cambridge Is On Fire. The band’s first new music of the year follows a monumental 2025, which found the band tailing thrilling Midlands duo, Gans on a comprehensive UK tour and the release of their essential, debut EP, Are You The Best Yet?
Offering a body of recorded work to back up hot and heavy gigs that are reliably and repeatedly up the wall, Hungry’s five-track EP not only included the heavy streaming fan favourite, Sick Of It, but also lead singles, Morning Coffee and the title track. Tacking the insightful and observant, frequently political views of twenty-something outsiders onto riff-led, boppable punk rock, Hungry’s 2026 return brings the band’s intellectual curiosities in line with their high-energy methods of delivery.
Cambridge Is On Fire glances at the band’s own birth certificates in a single that’s as confrontational as it is sardonic, signalling a heavier instrumental turn as the band takes on another twelve months of sweatbox live gigs and the construction of detailed, acerbic missives on merry, modern England. Specifically drawing from history to hold a mirror up to the present, Hungry affect a sonic boom of fizzing, political rock in exploring how enclosure laws saw the erosion of common land and how that grab of shared territory bears unambiguous comparison to the exploitation of public property, whether cultural or otherwise, for private gain in the present day.
Cambridge Is On Fire marks first in a promised run of releases that reflect Hungry’s present “fenland gothic” preoccupations, with both lyrics and carefully placed symbols across release visuals articulating their proposition
As with their earliest releases, including the BBC Radio 1-supported debut, The Jig (garnering happy, immediate comparisons to pre-stadium IDLES, Sports Team and DEADLETTER), what’s being served up by Hungry is inevitably chaotic and knowingly messy, but sharpened by the sense that something has to give.
Frontman and lyricist, Jacob Peck says: “The song began as a knowingly daft pastiche of noughties indie built on a silly bassline, ironic guitars and exaggerated Americanisms before our warped, post-punk-pop sensibilities kicked in. Scattered all over that is the thematic basis for the lyrics, expressing our frustrations with middle-class comforts, over-analysis without action, nimbyism, intellectual cowardice as a stand-in for material change and all too easy deference to business and power.
“The vast, desolate expanse of the fens, formed through profit-driven intervention, mirrors the cultural landscape we exist in, which struggles to thrive and breathe under cuts and times of national hardship. We’re looking to investigate the idea of the English nation and its role in mutual assistance and what we choose to celebrate as ‘England’.”
HUNGRY is completed by Peck’s co-conspirators and schoolyard friends, drummer, Stan Rankin, guitarist Kit Thomas and bassist Jas Malig, who all moved as an existing band from Cambridge to Manchester and found new roots in a basement student party scene. Enduring long nights that stretch into bright mornings, the band bravely combines their social lives and an earned reputation for combining big mouths with big songs by propping up, under great duress and extreme hangovers, the city’s hospitality industry.
Unquestionably one of the country’s most entertainingly unhinged live experiences, frequently employing thematic costume to complement their music and good gang mentality, more HUNGRY are due to be announced imminently