‘Batcat‘, the latest single from Glasgow mega rockers Mogwai is taken from their impending album, ‘The Hawk Is Howling’.

The new album was described on the band’s website as a “howling hawk” of a record (a hint at the title) and to surmise from the evidence shown in ‘Batcat‘, that wouldn’t be far wrong. ‘Batcat‘ is, oddly, evocative of Queens Of The Stone Age in places with a dirty, grimy, sleazy rock feel to it and is in a similar mould to Mogwai tracks of yore such as ‘Ratts Of The Capital’, and ‘Like Herod’.

The BBC music department seem to be well into their post-rock at the moment, having used ‘Explosions In The Sky’ on the advert for a recent nature documentary, and employing Mogwai’s ‘Mr. Beast’ album at every opportunity on Top Gear, so expect to hear ‘Batcat‘ in the new series when they talk about the most brutish car in existence, for this is exactly what this song is, a brute.

The rhythm section is what drives this song. The bassline like a river; a sinisterly meandering little stream to begin with, but it soon bursts down the mountainside, exploding into a torrent of noise, the drums pushing it along like a tidal force, culminating in its arrival into the sea, where it smashes a ship against the rocks.

Stomping, crushing and destroying. The track is five and a half minutes long (give or take a few seconds) and Mogwai manage to pack so much intensity into those five minutes that it feels like you have just wrestled with a hurricane, and won (or survived the last half an hour of a recent My Bloody Valentine concert all over a again).

‘Batcat‘ is a ferociously powerful track thoroughly capable of pissing off the neighbours, probably by shaking their house to the ground.