Ulrika Spacek keep losing rooms. On EXPO they built one out of themselves

Ulrika Spacek have been going for over a decade and have four albums to show for it. That's a slow rate, and the explanation isn't laziness. They keep losing the room.

Be literal about this, because the rooms are the story. Their first two records were made in a shared house in Homerton called KEN, where they lived and recorded and, by every account including their own, mostly hung around. Then East London did to KEN what East London does. KEN went in 2019, right as they were trying to write album three. That record took another four years to arrive and nearly didn't arrive at all.

Go back to The Album Paranoia (2016) and you can hear the house. It's a record made by people who could start a take at two in the morning because the drums were already set up in the next bedroom, and it has the sprawl and the patience that comes with that. Nothing on it is in a hurry. Modern English Decoration followed in 2017 and did the same thing with sharper edges.

Then nothing, for six years.

The album that was filed away

The band started work on the follow-up in mid-2018. When KEN went the next year, they moved into a professional studio in Hackney, only the second time in their life they'd worked on the clock. Every band that's made this move describes it the same way and they were no exception: the tensions showed up, the logistics ate the songs. Then the pandemic closed the door on it entirely and Compact Trauma went in a drawer, unfinished, on the reasonable assumption that it would stay there.

It came out in March 2023 on Tough Love, and the reason it's a good record rather than a sad one is that it stopped pretending. The title is not subtle. It's an album about a compressed, deferred, unresolved bad time, and it sounds like one: guitars that keep circling the same figure, songs that take their time admitting what they're about. Post-Trash made it album of the week and it turned up on year-end lists, and it remains the record people mean when they mention this band at all.

But it's a record about an absence, and there's a limit to how long you can make those.

What the sample bank actually solves

EXPO arrived on 6 February 2026 via Full Time Hobby: eleven songs, forty-five minutes, recorded at the Total Refreshment Centre in London and at Stugion in Stockholm, engineered, produced and mixed by the band themselves. The method is the interesting part, and they've been straightforward about it. "Our music has always been a collage," they said of the album, "but what makes this album a landmark for us is that we went one step further and made our own sound bank and essentially sampled ourselves."

Read that next to the last six years and it stops sounding like a production credit. A band that lost the room where they made things went and built a room out of their own recorded fragments, then played inside it. The samples on this album are Ulrika Spacek. When the digital drums come in under the real ones on "Build a Box Then Break It", nobody has left and nobody has arrived. It's the same five people twice.

What that buys them, musically, is a kind of doubling that the guitars alone never managed. "Picto" opens with modulated guitar that recalls Women at their most unstable, then acoustic and programmed drums stack up until you can't tell which layer is the room and which is the memory of one. There's film music in here, sampled strings that swagger like a Bond cue and then get cut off mid-gesture. Rhys Edwards has always written in fragments rather than sentences, and for once the production is doing the same thing he is.

EXPO means exhibition

The word is the thesis. This is an album about a world where everyone is permanently on display, exhibiting themselves, living in public and waiting to be seen, and it manages to say so without a single line that reads like a tweet about tweeting. "Showroom Poetry" is a title doing a lot of work. So is "This Time I'm Present", which is the sort of phrase you'd say to reassure somebody and also the sort of phrase you'd say to a camera.

The pairing with the method is what makes it land. A band whose physical space got sold out from under them, now writing about the space that replaced it, and doing it by turning themselves into a library of samples anybody could load. The internet took the last room too. They made a copy of themselves and moved in.

The one thing on EXPO I'd argue with is the ending. "Incomplete Symphony" wants to be the exhale and it's the only moment where the record does the thing it's been avoiding for forty minutes, which is resolve.

The scene that got named without them

Here's the frustrating bit. Ulrika Spacek were making difficult, patient, guitar-shaped London art-rock in 2016, which is two or three years before the British music press decided that difficult, patient, guitar-shaped London art-rock was a movement with a pub attached. When the Windmill scene got its narrative, they weren't in it. Wrong postcode, wrong year, no origin myth.

That's most of the reason a band this good is playing rooms this size. Their live record from 2024 is worth the time if you want to hear what the songs do without a scene attached to them.

EXPO is their best album and it arrived in February to about a tenth of the noise a Windmill band would have got for it. The reappraisal usually comes about eight years late, at which point everyone agrees it was obvious. You can get there early. Rate it, tell me I'm wrong about the ending, and if you think Compact Trauma is still the one, make the case below.