The Fall
‘Post Script’
(Cog Sinister)
CD / Vinyl / Digital
Released 8 September 2026
★★★★½ 4.5/5
There is something quite fitting about a final release put together from the archives of a band that always seemed to exist inside its own maelstrom of controversy with Mark E. Smith at the centre of its kinetic orbit causing much discusssion.
Famously, in life Smith never played by the rules, and the same seems to continue in his psychic afterlife. Put together by Smith confidants Ed Blaney and Simon “Ding” Archer, the album takes nine leftover vocal and lyrical pieces from the iconic frontman and reimagines them in new soundscapes — a process that somehow feels entirely in keeping with Smith, who may even have preferred this method, sidestepping the graft and grind of keeping a band together.
It’s not just any two chancers cobbling this together, either. The backing tracks are excellent: grinding, metallic slabs of industrial noise that stand up in their own right, way beyond any Fall-related flag of convenience.
Whether this is “The Fall” or not is a red herring.
And, in truth, whether it is or not is pure distraction.
What you get instead is a hybrid project created by two key players from the latter-day Fall orbit. Blaney was a close confidant and drinking buddy of Smith, while also making records under his own name and with his own projects. He has partnered with Simon “Ding” Archer, former Fall bassist, long-time studio collaborator and engineer, whose CV also includes PJ Harvey and Pixies. Archer’s 6DB studio work became deeply entwined with the later Fall, both as musician and producer.
Together they create the musical backdrops that stitch Smith’s beyond-the-grave vocals — alongside three vocals from Blaney and a couple from Ding — into heavy, captivating, dark-energy soundtracks.
It’s thrilling, visceral stuff. Archer’s studio skill, allied to that machine-like bass playing honed through stints with The Fall, PJ Harvey and Pixies, gives the whole thing a dangerous physicality.
The result feels less like an exercise in archaeology and more like an attempt to let Smith’s words loose inside a different machine.
That is where the record gets interesting.
Rather than trying to recreate some museum-piece version of The Fall, it understands that Smith’s voice, rhythm and language were always strange enough to survive transplantation. Dropped into these harsher, more metallic surroundings, the words become something else again: familiar, dislocated and oddly alive.
The question of authenticity starts to feel beside the point.
What matters is whether it works.
And often, it does.
This is not The Fall.
It is something else entirely — a phoenix dragged from the ashes, a new and strange beast, and ultimately a fitting epitaph for Smith and these lost vocal takes.
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