With ‘Up & Away’, Dragon Welding released one of 2025’s greatest singles. The track’s mechanical heart combined with a repetitious hook created something so insanely catchy, it became impossible to resist. It was certainly one of those tracks that stayed with the listener long after it ended, setting up great hopes for its parent album ‘The Naughty Step’.
In itself, ‘The Naughty Step’ brought lots to enjoy. Although the bulk of the record wasn’t anywhere near as instant as ‘Up & Away’, its best material had a little more of a commercial edge than previous Dragon Welding works, taking the synth based sounds of one of the UK’s most cult bands into more melodic places.
To kick off Dragon Welding’s journey in 2026, ‘This Maintenant’ has a rockier edge, which comes through via a prominent guitar that adds a buzzing, almost industrial edge to the band’s sound, but despite this slight shift, the core of the track is actually as infectious as the brilliant ‘Up & Away’. Really capitalising on the Dragon Welding gift for an easy hook, this track comes with two: vocalist Nik Cockshott peppers a spiky verse with a repeated refrain of “Do you remember me now?”, a pointed question that sits rather comfortably against a pulsing, electronica based riff that that appears almost as pointed itself, before slipping into a chorus where a repeated “on and on and on” aims to draw in an audience with the minimum of fuss.
Between the mechanical music and the huge reliance on repetition, this is easily recognisable as a Dragon Welding track, even before taking Cockshott’s very natural vocal into consideration. The fact that the music sets up a solid rhythm and then barely changes – it allows the rise and fall of the guitar and an a brief increase of anger within the vocal to bring anything resembling a mood shift of even the slightest kind – will also reinforce a relative feeling of familiarity for the fans. Simply put, this marks a return that really builds hope for any interesting follow up tracks, whether they’re in the shape of easily digested digital singles or a more adventurous full length release.
Bringing a little extra value, the download of ‘This Maintenant’ comes with an alternative instrumental version of the track. What’s interesting about this is that, although it seems as if the main recording relies on its chorus to do a great deal of the heavy lifting to make things stick, the instrumental reworking shows that the music itself is very strong. Shorn of a vocal, the relatively speedy, very mechanical sound shows how effortlessly Dragon Welding have embraced the semi-industrial. To fill space left by an absent vocal, an extra synth melody is applied, coupling the buzzing guitar riff with a disjoined bleeping that sounds like a sample from an old 8-bit computer game, and an extra layer of synth oriented bass brings a much deeper and darker tone to the main melody itself. These changes are relatively subtle, all things considered, but they’ll give listeners just enough of a different experience to make everything feel genuinely worthwhile.
Although this is little more than a musical snapshot, it feels good to have Dragon Welding back again, almost exactly a year on from the release of ‘The Naughty Step’. For those who missed that record and its associated singles, this will certainly provide just as much of an effective entry point into the band’s semi-cold, slightly retro world.
March 2026