NO MURDER NO MOUSTACHE

track-list:
Intro (A Moment Of Reflection)
A Demon In The Dark
Dic Penderyn
Sending The Soldiers In
Wasted
Collateral Damage
As Darkness Falls
Tested On Animals
Celtic Skies
Never Again
One More Round
Second Chance
Raise Your Glasses
Grey Tracksuit (bonus track)

Rising steadily from the underground’s sweat-soaked basements and festival backstages, No Murder No Moustache returns with a bold new statement.
The brainchild of Owen Crawford, the formidable Celtic punk project will release its towering new album, ‘As Everything Else Decays‘, on Friday, February 27th – ushered in by the anthemic single ‘Wasted‘ and an arresting accompanying video.
Built on driving rhythms, dynamic arrangements, and an unfiltered punk ethos, No Murder No Moustache has carved out a sound that balances grit with uplift.
The music is raucous yet thoughtful, rooted firmly in Celtic punk traditions while refusing to be confined by them.
There’s a muscular urgency in the instrumentation – rapid-fire drums, surging guitars, and folk-inflected flourishes – but beneath the stomp-and-sing-along energy lies something more deliberate.
Lyrically, Crawford pulls no punches.
His songs confront unethical regimes, anti-fascist resistance, mental health struggles, grief, and life’s inevitable wrong turns.
Yet even in their darkest moments, these narratives are stitched together with a thread of resilience.
The defiance feels communal rather than nihilistic;
the choruses are built not just to be shouted, but to unite.
Describing the new record as more reflective and personal than its predecessor, Crawford explains that while the album remains deeply rooted in Celtic punk, he has dug further inward this time.
The goal was to bottle the same raw intensity and emotional honesty that defines his live performances – an atmosphere where catharsis and celebration collide – and translate it faithfully into the studio.
If ‘Wasted‘ is any indication, ‘As Everything Else Decays‘ captures that balance with conviction:
punchy and anthemic on the surface, but layered with introspection beneath the roar.
With a run of live shows and festival appearances already on the horizon, 2026 is shaping up to be a defining year for No Murder No Moustache.
As everything else decays, Crawford seems determined to build something louder, prouder, and impossible to ignore.

“No Murder No Moustache has always been about highlighting injustice and tragedy while still drawing inspiration from absurdity – Welsh folklore has both in terrifying amounts.”

“The album lives in the same space as those old stories – where horror and humour sit uncomfortably close together.”

“Balancing Celtic storytelling with punk chaos is always a gamble – sometimes the pipes take over, sometimes the riffs win, and that’s part of the thrill.”

“Being a solo artist means I never have to choose between the punk or the Celtic – I just follow the story and hope the chaos behaves.”

“Song order is still a creative act – it’s how you consolidate emotions and messages. Some tracks didn’t make the cut simply because they didn’t help tell the story.”

“’A Demon in the Dark’ smells of wet forest mud and feels like travelling home in a wooden ship through a storm in the dead of night.”

“The darkest ideas make the sharpest jokes – sometimes you have to laugh at the world just to keep from screaming.”

“I once turned political scandal and racial violence into punchlines; humour can be a scalpel for scars that never healed.”

“I had to hold back the anger – shouting is easy, storytelling isn’t.”

“If the future belongs to the far right and mega-capitalism, maybe this album proves someone cared – or maybe it just proves we were still making plastic CDs when the planet was burning.”

“If No Murder No Moustache were a mythic character, it would be the one who drank too much Guinness, forgot to close the floodgates, and drowned the kingdom.”

Welsh Celtic Punk has always been a place where stories, anger, and laughter collide – and few acts embody that spirit as vividly as No Murder No Moustache.
With a new single on the horizon and an ambitious new album coming in early 2026, the project stands at a turning point.
The sound is bigger, the emotions sharper, and the songwriting both more personal and more political.
We sat down with the mind behind the music to explore the stories, struggles, and strange inspirations fueling ‘As Everything Else Decays‘.
If the new album ‘As Everything Else Decays‘ were a piece of Welsh folklore, what kind of tale would it be – heroic, tragic, mischievous, or something far stranger?
“Great question, I’m going to choose a small part of the story of the king Math fab Mathonwy (info here) particularly the part about how the king’s nephews conspire to send him to war so they can r*pe his foot holder while he is away (Math must keep his feet in the lap of a virgin when he isn’t at war or he will die). As punishment, Math turns both of the nephews into a range of animals for 3 years with the requirement that they must mate with each other and produce an offspring before they can be turned back. That’s quite an intense story to open an interview, but the reason I’ve chosen it is that No Murder No Moustache has always been about highlighting injustice, tragedy, and some of the most terrible aspects of the human experience, whilst also drawing inspiration from absurdity. This story definitely has both of these in.”
Your music blends Celtic tradition with punk energy.
Which side is harder to control – the emotional storytelling or the chaotic punk instinct?
“It’s absolutely a fine balance and difficult to control both sides at times. Some tracks like ‘Dic Penderyn’ from the new album, or ‘A Trace Of Blood And Tears’ from the last album take the Celtic instrumentation a bit further, with some quite long (for a punk song anyway) instrumental parts, building off each other. Other’s such as ‘One More Round’ and Second Chance were a struggle to get any Celtic bits in at all. Being a solo artist though, I don’t have to worry too much as there aren’t other bands members to consider so no one will be left out of anything if the song goes more punk or more celtic. I like to bring the chaotic side into the live shows though.”
What moment in the writing process made you realize the album needed to exist, not just as songs but as a full narrative or emotional arc?
“Growing up in the 90s, listening to albums start to finish was how I listened to music so I always wanted to make sure it kind of flowed properly. It’s not the same now with streaming, but I still see song choice, and song order on an album as a creative activity and an opportunity to consolidate messages and emotions across songs. There were 2 songs that didn’t make it onto the album for that reason alone, they just didn’t add anything to it.”
If the upcoming single had a scent, a texture, and a weather condition attached to it, what would they be?
“‘A Demon In The Dark’ to me feels like the wet muddy forest where I filmed the music video in a torrential rainstorm. Everything was soaked, the cameras were in plastic bags to protect them, lots of the video effects have come from drops of water on a lens, and the smell of damp stayed in my car for a week. In terms of lyrics, it’s about travelling back to your homeland, and in my mind it’s travelling in a wooden ship, in the pouring rain in the dead of night.”
Celtic Punk is known for mixing humour with heavy themes.
What’s the darkest idea you’ve ever wrapped in a joke – or the funniest idea you’ve ever turned into something heartbreaking?
“On this album, there’s definitely some darkness, but in terms of turning it around into humour, it’s a choice between ‘Tested On Animals’ (about an ex-UK prime minister and a pig) which potentially contains the funniest lyrics I’ve ever written in ‘I’ve got an itch, that needs a pork scratching’, or the bonus track ‘Grey Tracksuit’, which is about race riots in 2024 where one of the racists got ‘Hit in the dick with a brick’ (look it up on youtube).”
What’s a traditional Welsh instrument, phrase, or cultural reference you’ve always wanted to use in your music but haven’t yet – and why?
“In Welsh there is a word ‘Hiraeth’ which doesn’t really have an English equivalent, but it kind of means longing, or homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed, especially in the context of Wales and Welsh culture. It is a mixture of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past (which may no longer exist or never existed anyway). I’ve always liked the idea of using this as a concept and as a Welsh speaker, I feel that I can use it appropriately in a song, but it’s become so popularised as a term in Wales, especially in music scenes, that in some ways, it doesn’t have the same meaning to me as it used to.”
Imagine someone hearing your music for the first time at the worst possible moment.
What misunderstanding about your sound would you fear most?
“Some of my songs are written in the first person, so occasionally I will sing in the role of someone that I am making a parody of. If you played one of those tracks at the wrong moment, you’d catch me singing something awful that is building up to the parody but hasn’t got there yet and that might put me very out of context. There’s a track that I’ve stopped playing live because of this exact reason.”
Your lyrics often walk the line between anger and reflection.
What’s an emotion you consciously pushed against while making this album?
“I’ve definitely had to hold back on the anger in lots of ways when putting this album together. It would be really easy to just go heavy on each song, shout about things, and simplify them into a repeatable 3 word chorus. I love songs like that, but they aren’t really my sort of style and there’s a lot of people doing them a lot better than I could too. I have to push myself away from doing that in order to find the right storytelling method and flow for the songs, bringing in a bit of shoutyness just where it has the most impact, but still maintaining what I like to think of as informed lyrics.”
What real-life event – big or small – unexpectedly shaped one of the new songs in a way even you didn’t see coming?
“I’ve already mentioned the prime minister and the pig, and the racist getting hit with a brick, so I’ll skip those for this one. When I was writing ‘Sending The Soldiers In’, I was researching a range of times when governments sent a disproportionate military/police response against civilian protest. One of the events I found was in a place called Llanelli in South West Wales which is a place I’m familiar with, where in 1911 the army shot 2 protesters. It’s barely spoken about in the same way as similar events in other towns so it was a real surprise for me to read about it.”
If you could collaborate with any non-punk musician to add an unusual flavour to your sound, who would it be and what role would they play?
“An impossible one unfortunately, but I’d love to incorporate more non-male vocals on some of the tracks. Immediate I’m thinking of Sinéad O’Connor to give an absolutely haunting vocal crossover line in a couple of the anti-war tracks. (Look up on youtube of Sinéad and the Chieftans in 1995 performing ‘The Foggy Dew’, it’s absolutely immense).”
How did your identity as a Welsh artist influence this record – deliberately, subconsciously, or even in resistance to certain expectations?
“Of course there’s some classic manifestations of Welsh stories on this album in songs like ‘Dic Penderyn’ and ‘Celtic Skies’. I usually include a Welsh Language track on all EP or Album size releases too, and despite writing one, it didn’t quite fit with the flow of the album, so there’s just a couple of Welsh words in Dic Penderyn instead. I would say less-consciously the influence of seeing the way that Welsh (and other Celtic nations) have historically been treated is what gives me the need to tell these stories, and write about injustices of other types too.”
If the new album were a physical artifact found centuries from now, what would archaeologists think it reveals about our current era?
“Let’s sadly assume that mega-capitalism and the far right win the culture war and that’s what the history books show. In that case I’d like to say that it would help to reveal that there were people who cared about other people, were anti-war, and could see through the charade of media bias and right-wing press. That’s probably a bit egotistical of me though. More likely it would reveal that we still wasted plastic and precious metals producing CDs when we should have been saving the planet.”
Your project name is famously unique.
If No Murder No Moustache were a character in a Celtic myth, what would its personality be – and what would be its fatal flaw?
“There’s a story of a place called Cantre’r Gwaelod, in which a wealthy kingdom drowns under the sea due to the man who controlled the flood gates to the city having too much of a party and forgetting to close them. (It reminds me of the song ‘White Pearl Black Oceans’ by Sonata Arctica too which is one of my favourite metal bands). Anyway, I can definitely see No Murder No Moustache drinking ‘Six Pints Of Guinness’ and forgetting to close the flood gates.”
With ‘As Everything Else Decays’, No Murder No Moustache steps into a new chapter:
one where the Celtic Punk roots sink deeper, the emotional weight grows heavier, and the songwriting reaches new levels of grit and honesty.
The December single is only the beginning of a story that promises both catharsis and chaos – a reminder that even as everything else decays, music remains a force worth holding on to.
Fok ‘bs’