Glasgow’s Humour shared a further taster from their upcoming debut album, “Learning Greek”, out August 8th on So Young Records, this time in the form of “Memorial”.

The fizzing “Memorial”, snottily anthemic but emotionally gutting, is a perfect example of the high-wire act Humour have pulled off across the album. It finds Christodoulidis on the beach at Troy, using poet Alice Oswald’s titular reinterpretation of Homer’s Iliad to find a new context through which to understand the way death’s inevitability can sit on our chest. “Oswald describes the Iliad as a catalogue of death,” he reflects. “It’s a step by step description of all these people being slaughtered, but it’s described in an incredibly beautiful way.”

Underlining the idea that history is kept alive by connection, in Humour’s own retelling Hector and his wife Andromache wait next to buzzsaw guitars, the knowledge of what’s to come hanging heavy between them like the blow that’ll wipe the Trojan hero from the board. As drummer Ruaridh Smith and bassist Lewis Doig ratchet the pace up and up and up, Christodoulidis reshapes thousands of years of granular history into a sharp point. It’s a joyful transgression — what if the Iliad ripped? — but it’s also a telling reminder that some stories should always be malleable in our mouths.

This Is Pop? today’s song of the day is here for you.