Humour: Learning Greek – Review

Humour: Learning Greek

So Young Records

Vinyl | CD | Digital

Released 8th August 2025

Humour are no laughing matter. In fact, their seriousness has only increased. Adam Brady reviews the debut LP from the Scottish quintet

Waiting can be a pain in the proverbial. You know it is coming, you want it to arrive. For Humour, the Glasgow-based five-piece that emerged post-COVID with their debut EP Pure Misery in 2022 and quickly followed that up with 2023’s A Small Crowd Gathered To Watch Me, the wait for us has allowed them to craft a stellar debut LP, Learning Greek.

Andreas Christodoulidis (vocals), Ross Patrizio (guitar), Jack Lyall (guitar), Ruairidh Smith (drums), and Lewis Doig (bass) have spent the time since A Small Crowed Gathered To Watch Me running with ideas, discarding others, centering around a theme that began with Christodoulidis learning, well, Greek. But that, ultimately, wasn’t enough:

“The idea of learning Greek stopped being just about learning the language. It became about exploring and investing in the things that make one Greek or give one a sense of national identity, especially as someone who’s second generation. It’s not so much about Greece as about my family and that feeling. It’s about feeling disconnected, almost like you’re outside of your own life, which is something I’ve written about a lot. “Learning Greek” was an attempt to get back into my life and feel like myself again.”

The story weaving that has so far been a hallmark of Christodoulidis’s lyrics has always had a strong personal aspect; this aspect has a greater sense of poignancy. Curiously, the title track features no lyrics but is instead a recording of Christodoulidis and his father, who lived in Greece during the right-wing military junta (1967-1974), reading On Philhellenes Street by Greek writer, surrealist poet, and photographer Andreas Embiriko. It is short and sweet, and the conversation between the two generations connecting over the sharing of their cultural heritage is one of the most heartwarming things I’ve heard in years. It is most certainly the emotional centre of the album. At various other points during the album, further snippets of inter-generational discourse can be heard.

The metaphorical shadow of Christodoulidis’s patrilineal ancestry is cast further by Dirty Bread, which is about his grandfather’s habits as an old man. A further nod to Christodoulidis’s search for himself through his heritage is the title of the song, taken from a line of a song by Sotiria Bellou, a rebetiko singer who, through her left-leaning activism, never received the recognition during her life she deserved.

Musically, there has been an evolution to Humour’s “weird” post-punk tendencies. Opener Neighbours is a post-hardcore pounder that has Christodoulidis shredding his vocals at the same time as Patrizio and Lyall shred their guitar strings. The overall ability of Patrizio, Lyall, Doig, and Smith to match the paranoiac lyric is just the first example of Humour taking their time reaps rewards.

Memorial is a bold take on the story of Andromache from her point of view as Hector, her husband and King of Troy, prepares to enter the battlefield for what will be the last time. Lack of originality and even copying one’s self is the subject of Plagiarist, which also sees the return of the “weird” post-punk sound.

One of the numerous things that sets Humour apart from their peers is Christodoulidis’s voice. From the get-go, his affected stuttering and pitching has been one of the band’s USPs. It is toned down here on Learning Greek, but that is no bad thing. The choosing of where and when it is deployed, and where and when it is not deployed is crucial.

I Only Have Eyes For You, a song about Christodoulidis’s depression he was suffering with when his sister got married and was unable to feel the happiness he believes he should have felt, features Theo Bleak. The glorious harmony in the chorus would have suffered immeasurably if he hadn’t sung it straight; whereas on I Knew We’d Talk About It One Day it’s use on the refrain “I did something, I regret it” conveys regret, remorse, confusion, and ultimately defiance.

It’s safe to say that not only have Humour met expectations with Learning Greek, they have exceeded them. The emotional content and impactful lyrical content is matched by the music. It’s powerful, heartrending, personal and exploratory. If this is what we get waiting for their first album, then the world, and not just Greece, is Humour’s oyster.

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All words by Adam Brady, who hosts The Adam Brady Show on Louder Than War Radio. You can find his author’s archive here