Formed in Brighton in 2017, Opus Kink began with brothers Fin and Sam Abbo alongside hometown friends Angus Rogers and Jazz Pope. While Fin (drums) and Jazz (keys) attended the same college and were also being taught trumpet by Jack Banjo Courtney (trumpet), it wasn’t until they all crossed paths later within the Brighton music scene that things began to click. With saxophonist Jed Morgans rounding out the lineup, the Opus Kink stage was set. 

More than anything, the band is an idealistic situation. Six people, with a taste for the same sounds, wanting to do something their way. It’s why there’s a manifesto they drew together when first seeking promoters and labels. 

“We were quite sick of answering the same things, or people not quite getting what we’re doing. It’s easy to assume that other people will understand where you’re coming from with a band,” Angus says. “From coming to see you or listening to the music, but apparently it is not thus, so wrote the manifesto, and the general gist of it was to announce and affirm ourselves as a strange smorgasbord cult.”

The manifesto extends beyond the six members themselves, bringing together a raft of like-minded artists, photographers, dancers and, as Angus puts it, “strange freaks that surround what we’re trying to do”. This has always been the goal. “We wanted it to essentially be a world that people could lower themselves tenderly into, and announce ourselves as a world rather than a band, which is unbearably pretentious, but that is what we are.”

Over the years, this all-for-one approach has produced a catalogue of jazz-driven but ultimately rock ‘n’ roll-focused EPs. Through this democracy of theirs, often there will be disagreements, but that’s the real beauty of living as such. “We don’t set out to find friction; it just exists because there are six people who often disagree and sometimes agree, but then what you hear is not necessarily a unanimous agreement,” Angus says. “We’ll give each other a bit of grace in some areas and others. I couldn’t say when we work best or what the formula is, because it’s still in flux. It’s impossible to pin down, and I don’t particularly mean that in a self-congratulatory, eclectic way. It’s impossible to pin down because it’s chaos.”

‘The Sweet Goodbye’ bristles with tension as Angus waxes poetic about the great loves and losses with the stickiness in between, while horn riffs rip through the colliding bombastic rhythms. For this outing, they found the assistance of producer Craig Silvey (Florence + The Machine, R.E.M., Sam Fender) to harness that chaos and fully flesh out their sound - a first for the group. 

The album also marks the end of seven years of anticipation. “There’s a lot of unnecessary pressure put on a debut album,” Jed says. “We’re already halfway towards the second album. Once you get past that hurdle of the debut album, you can just keep going.”

That attitude helped shape the record itself. It’s Opus Kink’s present day rather than trying to take things back to the start. “We want to feel like we’re in the middle of our lives, rather than upstarts for eternity,” Angus admits.

He also readily acknowledges Opus Kink are a band made for albums. The kind of band who, while a hit single would be lovely, they’re content with pouring everything into a solid body of work to be appreciated wholly. This level of holistic ambition, of course, comes with its own pitfalls. “It’s a whole other thing, it involves a lot more people as well, and a big team behind it, and lots of love and kissing, and then lots of hatred and breakups and stuff,” says Angus.

While time may have passed, Opus Kink are still the same band who exist solely in their lane. “Maybe to our detriment, but we don’t really have a handle on what is happening at the moment in the culture; we don’t know where we stand.” Nodding back to the manifesto idea, Angus elaborates: “We stand on a hill, it might be a lonely one, boohoo, but anticipating how and where something’s going to land is a fool’s errand, I think a lot of the time we stand alone purely by dint of our approach, the six person democracy - as I said, very unadvised by many - but that will, if that does anything, then it will make it something within us, something unforeseen.

“There’s nothing under the sun that doesn’t break much ground aside from internally; it breaks ground for us, and if our character and our whims and weaknesses and strengths come across in a particular way, then that’s how to be new. But as to where it lands, where it fits? I’ve got no idea, and I don’t care,” he shrugs. “I don’t think that we fit into a musical landscape, even if we’d released this debut album two years ago, it wouldn’t have fit into anywhere,” Jed says. 

Now that the seal is broken, what this means for the future is, as you could probably guess, “Fuck knows, man. We don’t know,” Angus smirks. “But we can talk all we want about we’re in our own lane, and we don’t need any external affirmation or anything like that, but to put a record out and for people to engage with it, and to have reviews, and to get booked for shows through it, and for it to be part of some small discourse somewhere. Does make us feel, you know, like, we exist a little bit more with the record out.” 

In a recent pub visit, where they were “clapping ourselves on the back”, they dutifully accepted that this is it now. “Whatever happens with this album, it’s a good thing for us regardless. We’re an album band who were forced to be a dithering EP band for a while,” Angus mentions, before giving a last bit of that Opus Kink charm: “Where we made friends and enemies along the way.” ■

Taken from the August 2026 issue of Dork. Opus Kink’s album ‘The Sweet Goodbye’ is out 31st July.