The four-piece arrive from Belfast with a reputation built on volume, dread and a refusal to sit still in any one genre. 'Marionette', their second EP, lands today through Heist or Hit, the gem of a Manchester independent that has previously offered a home to luminaries like Westside Cowboy and Her's. It was produced by Daniel Fox, the Gilla Band bassist turned reliable presence behind some of the most punishing guitar records of recent years. A little over a year ago, Makeshift Art Bar were a self-releasing concern firing off their own debut from a Gmail account. Since then, they've toured Europe behind Chalk, stood on the 3Olympia Theatre stage in Dublin as guests of Just Mustard, and found their way onto BBC 6 Music. The ascent has been steep and quick.

You would not learn any of this from the band. In the always-on, everything-is-content world of 2026, groups at this point in their lives are supposed to arrive fully media-trained with a story, an origin and a polished anecdote kept ready for occasions exactly like this one. Ask Makeshift Art Bar for theirs, and you probably would get the door politely closed."The book of MAB's history was unfortunately lost to time," they offer. "We've forgotten everything that's ever happened to us."

It is a good line if you can't be bothered to play the personality game, but it's also the whole posture in miniature. Here is a band whose records concern brainwashing, possession, propaganda and the slow handover of the self to forces beyond it, made by people who, asked to explain themselves, deflect with the deadpan of a customer service email. The music is enormous and frightening. The people behind it would like you to know as little as possible, and would prefer to be funny about it.

So here's what we can know: "Joseph [Sweeney] does vocals, guitar and bass, Callum S[weeny] plays guitar and lapsteel, Callum M[cGuigan] plays guitar and bass, and Alleyah [Boulaich] plays drums." Nobody seems precious about which falls to whom; the structure and the fluidity are sort of the point. The lapsteel, a country instrument turned corrosive, is the strangest thing here by a distance; a signal of a band more than willing to push beyond the expected.

"I think we've all developed and understand our roles within the band, whether that's in writing or performance," they say of the distance travelled since their early steps. "Not that it's necessarily set in stone, but we've experimented enough to know what works for ourselves and what doesn't." For a band barely past their first introductions, it is a pleasingly clear-eyed read on 'the craft'. You learn the rules well enough to stop thinking about them, then you start breaking them on purpose.

The shards are everywhere on 'Marionette'. Where last year's debut, the gloriously titled 'Lackluster Writing Makes Fundamental Reading', read as a collection of strong songs, this one moves as a single, worsening mood. 'Chocolate' takes social anxiety and a taste for one's own company and lets them curdle into something close to surrender. 'Discipline', the one with the Benidorm impersonator, grinds forward on industrial repetition until the beat feels less like rhythm and increasingly like a sentence being carried out. 'Servant', the closer, abandons most of the guitars for a hypnotic loop and a lyric about being controlled. The clipped beats of drum machines and the crunch of electronic feedback run all through it.

"'Marionette' feels a lot more like a thematic body of work in comparison to 'Lackluster Writing'," they admit. "We were very conscious about that when writing, and also sought out new and unfamiliar instruments like synths and drum machines to keep things interesting." It is the closest they come to a statement of intent, until you work out that music this smart and pleasingly destructive does all the talking for them.

There is a neat, probably accidental rhyme in all this. 'Marionette' is an EP about losing control of yourself, about the moment a person stops doing the driving and becomes a thing that is driven. And there, as its calling card, sits a film about a man who has vanished so far into an impersonation of somebody else that the seams have gone. The tribute act is the marionette. Whether the band engineered the symmetry or simply liked the gag, it does the record's work for it.

None of this happens in a vacuum, even if the band would never put it so grandly. Belfast has spent the last few years turning out more than its share of difficult, brilliant guitar music, and Makeshift Art Bar are among the harshest and least compromising of the lot. The band themselves are warmer on the subject of home than on almost anything else. "Because the scene in Belfast is quite small, it forces a connection between all of the artists," they say. "It's very supportive in that way."

What they won't do is claim to be improving the place. Invited to say what Makeshift Art Bar give back to the city that made them, they decline the compliment outright: "I don't think we try to bring anything to Belfast other than ourselves."There is something close to principle in the modesty. The appeal of the place, as they see it, is precisely that it has never hardened into a movement with a house sound and a uniform. "The diversity of the music, with it not being a full-on 'scene', is part of the appeal and makes Belfast music so interesting," they say. "People aren't copying each other."

That previously mentioned video is just one piece of evidence of that refusal to stick to the well-trodden paths, and the band are honest enough to admit it was barely their idea. "We originally had a completely different idea for the 'Discipline' video," they explain, "but the director, Colin Peppard, just texted us one day about this whole new idea he'd had, which became the video. Because the concept was so out there, we kind of let him just do his thing because we saw his passion for it and trusted his vision, and he killed it." Following up a clip about a fictionalised Harry Styles act dissolving over warm lager would defeat most bands. They are unbothered. "No, we aren't stressed about topping this video - it's a new world for us and we're excited to keep experimenting."

It would be easy, on this evidence, to file Makeshift Art Bar as art-school provocateurs, the kind of band who treat every waking moment as raw material. The first half of that is fair enough. "We're all equally consumed by art and media," they say. "Film, painting, literature, gaming etc. all play huge roles in our lives. Creative outlets and expression are extremely important for us." For a group whose music sounds like a nervous system under siege, this is about as on-brand as a confession gets.

The second half they puncture all by themselves. Asked for the thing people might not expect about them, the band who make records about the war machine and the collapse of the self reach for the most ordinary fact available. "We're employed." Possibly the least unexpected two words a band could offer in a world of £0.003 per stream, and the entire idealised myth of the haunted young noise outfit deflates on cue. They have jobs. They turn up to them. Somewhere between the day shift and the apocalypse, they make challenging, informed, inventive art rock. Such is the machine.

Still, hopefully they haven't used up all their time off yet. The summer ahead is busy by the standards of a band that began the year as new signings. "We're doing a few in-store shows in the UK and Ireland to celebrate the release of the EP," they say. "We're also playing a few festivals in the Czech Republic and Luxembourg, which will be a first for us in both of those countries, so that's exciting." A UK headline tour follows in the autumn.

As for where any of it is heading, they have a single stated ambition, and it is the most revealing thing they say. Not arenas, not festival headlines, not a place in the canon. Something stranger, and funnier, and entirely of a piece with everything else. Asked what winning looks like, there's one picture they reach for.

"Success will look like us on a rotating stage in the middle of the room."

The rest, you suspect, they'll let get lost to time.

Makeshift Art Bar's EP 'Marionette' is out now.