‘Most of the songs were written in the midst of a breakdown,” says Owen Williams, lead singer with indie rock group the Tubs. “My long-term relationship had ended, so I was drunk constantly and being kind of obsessive about the people I was dating.”

Williams doesn’t really need to tell me that he was in a difficult place while writing his band’s second album, Cotton Crown – the evidence is in the lyrics. Tubs songs might jangle deceptively with intricate riffs and Teenage Fanclub-style harmonies, but the words are loaded with self-laceration. Manipulative, irritating, sycophantic, unreliable: these are just some of the ways Williams portrays himself on record.

The 32-year-old seems none of those things when I meet him at a Wetherspoon’s in the band’s native south-east London where, over a succession of pints, he cheerfully explains how the Tubs has always been a vehicle to “do a hatchet job” on himself. “Sometimes I actually end up painting myself as a lot more unlikable than I am,” he admits. “But I’ve always liked lyrics that can be brutal.”

Williams’s life was in the doldrums when the band recorded their 2023 debut Dead Meat. His previous group, noise-rock outfit Joanna Gruesome, had split in 2017 and new projects – including an attempt to publish a novel – had all fizzled out. Williams says he had “zero expectations” that anyone outside his circle would care about the Tubs, whom he formed with fellow Joanna Gruesome members Max Warren and George Nicholls, and who are these days completed by drummer Taylor Stewart, along with occasional guest vocals from Lan McArdle, also formerly of Joanna Gruesome.

“We just turned up and bashed that first album out,” says Williams. “We didn’t actually put much effort into it.”

Whether that’s true or not (and with its unusual hooks and harmonies, Dead Meat certainly didn’t sound bashed out), Williams is adamant that they’ve tried a lot harder on its follow-up. Cotton Crown is full of songs about Williams’s relationship woes, told with bleak humour. (“Took a bit of what I think was speed,” is certainly one way of beginning a love song.) But what really sets it apart from its predecessor is the inclusion of final track Strange, which deals with the death of Charlotte Greig, Williams’s mother, by suicide in 2014.

Williams says he had been trying unsatisfactorily to write about his mother for years until he stumbled on a way in: writing not about her death directly so much as the social awkwardness and bizarre situations that he faced in the immediate aftermath. “Sometimes when everyone’s high / They ask me what it’s like / If I’m all right,” he sings. “I say it makes me more interesting / Then they laugh / And then it’s all fine.” Most jolting of all is the way he recalls finding out the method she used to kill herself by reading an article in WalesOnline.

Williams has a keen, almost novelistic eye for the minutiae of day-to-day interactions – sending up both himself and the well-meaning folk who tried to console him. “At the wake someone took my hand / Said that I should write a song about this,” sings Williams at the song’s end. “Well, whoever the hell you were / I’m sorry, I guess this is it.”

“I don’t think you can really touch on what it’s actually like [to lose your mother],” he says. “It’s too big. But in a perverse sort of way, writing about it from this angle has given it some kind of emotional heft.”

Williams’s mother was a writer and musician, too. Her beautiful debut album, 1998’s Night Visiting Songs, was a mix of original tracks and reimagined folk standards that was the focus of a Guardian profile in 2023. Williams grew up in a home full of various touring folk musicians, and his love of the genre clearly influenced his vocal style, which is often compared to that of a young Richard Thompson.

The sleeve for Cotton Crown also features his mother – she’s photographed in a graveyard, breastfeeding Williams as a baby. The picture was originally used in a vinyl release of hers which Williams has carried around with him from home to home. “It felt appropriate to use it because the fact I was having a breakdown was very linked to her. She’s kind of in the background of all the songs on the record, not just Strange,” he says. It is, he admits, yet another peculiar aspect of her death that her image is now acting as a kind of promotional tool for his album. “Now that the vinyls have started arriving at my house, it does feel a bit much. Sometimes I think: should I have done that?”

Another thing Williams has refused to shy away from in his songwriting is the reality of living with poor mental health. His struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder were laid bare on earlier songs such as Round the Bend. Cotton Crown continues the excavations: on Narcissist, he sings about wanting to hook up with a potential sociopath in order to distract himself from more existential thoughts.

He hopes his lyrics act as an antidote to the romanticisation of mental illness. “Everyone has sympathy for [people with] mental illness in a kind of abstract way,” says Williams. “But that doesn’t really work in an intimate relationship or friendship. Sometimes people who are mentally ill are really fucking annoying. Anxious people are annoying! Especially if you have something like OCD and you’re constantly asking for reassurance about some catastrophic fear that you’ve become obsessed with.”

Williams paints an equally unforgiving picture of being a musician in the modern world – one in which nobody makes any money any more, and any glamour associated with indie rock has long since vanished: “When you’re dating, telling someone you’re in a jangle-pop band is basically a red flag these days,” he says, laughing. It has to be said, few would be tempted to sign up for the rock’n’roll lifestyle after listening to Dead Meat’s title track, in which Williams explores the previously untapped subject of simultaneously running out of beans and the steroid cream you use to treat a stubborn groin rash.

What the Tubs document so well is that period in life in between young adulthood and middle-age, when the party lifestyle starts to seem less carefree, and adult issues are more prone to intrusion. In this sense it shares a similarity with Charli xcx’s Brat, albeit a much scruffier Brat that grew up listening to early REM and Hüsker Dü.

Williams laughs off the comparison but says that he has noticed that the songs do strike a particular chord with men in their 30s. “Guys over the last decade have maybe felt this pressure to be living more virtuously,” he says. “And some of them have said that our music makes them feel like they don’t have to be this super-virtuous, perfect person – but they also don’t have to be a misogynistic arsehole either. There’s, like, a third way.”

That way is a throwback to pre-social media times, before everybody felt monitored and the music business became slickly professionalised. “I think other bands practise a lot more than we do,” says Williams. “We might run through the set once and be like, ‘Can we go to the pub now?’”

As for playing live – at present Williams says they can only handle that by getting extremely drunk beforehand. “It’s maybe a bit unsustainable. The drinking in the band can be quite exhausting. We always feel like every show is a big deal, and we probably overcompensate for that.”

Not all chaos is good chaos. On the eve of their sold out gig at Moth Club in London last December, their bassist Max was hit by a car and hospitalised, meaning it had to be cancelled. “We immediately started treating it like a joke, posting pictures from his hospital bed,” says Williams. “Then he went to ICU with blood clots on his lungs. It was quite dicey. I was thinking – if he dies, will we have to take those Instagram posts down?” Fortunately Max pulled through, although he’s still in a wheelchair.

The same month also saw the departure of Nicholls, whose spidery, Johnny Marr-like guitar lines elevated the songs (for all Williams’s claims of minimal rehearsing, the band can undoubtedly play). Nicholls is off to focus on his career lecturing at Goldsmiths, University of London, but Williams is adamant that the Tubs are only just getting started. In fact they’ve already written album number three, which apparently has a northern soul-infused sound. Creativity comes easily to Williams – he writes songs and stories constantly. And despite the struggles and the squalor of being a musician in 2025, he concedes that it’s a pretty good life overall.

“It’s not like I need to buy clothes or whatever it is that people buy,” he says. “All I need to get by is food and pints.”

And so with that in mind, we get another round in.

• The Tubs tour the UK and Ireland until 5 April. Cotton Crown is out now

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org. You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk