The World Is To Dig by They Might Be Giants – Album Review

24/05/2026

By Ellie Victor

It is never an easy assignment, reviewing the latest They Might Be Giants album. Where do you start with a band who have spent four decades treating popular music like a chemistry set, a prank mirror and, occasionally, a precision-tooled hit factory?

Expect musical eclecticism, lyrical brilliance and absurdity; ideas that soar and some that flounder; politics, wisdom, madness, frustrating off-kilter ditties that probably should have been binned and, fingers crossed, the occasional absolute banger. This is, after all, the group who gave us ‘Don’t Let’s Start’, ‘They’ll Need A Crane’, ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ and, more recently, ‘The Communists Have The Music’. They are capable of sounding like Sparks, Devo, Jonathan Richman, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, XTC, Nilsson and a public information film that has fallen down some stairs.

The World Is To Dig is, godammit, their 24th album, and it’s their first since 2021’s Grammy-nominated BOOK. John Flansburgh and John Linnell remain one of pop’s great odd couples, not because they are difficult to understand, but because they are so determined to understand everything sideways. They do not so much write songs as build miniature contraptions and set them loose.

They Might Be Giants, 2026
image: Shervin Lainez

“Near hooks”

The record begins in typically abstruse fashion with ‘Back In Los Angeles’, a clinking jazz-club swinger where Flansburgh somehow, perhaps deliberately, misses the low notes. It has the antique clatter of a Weimar cabaret number performed by a man who has just read a troubling pamphlet. It is the kind of oddity They Might Be Giants usually hide mid-album, but it really should not have been the opener.

Anyway, ‘Wu-Tang’ gets things going with the kind of wordy, soaring chorus they do so well. Not quite banger category, perhaps, but at least there’s a take-off. It has that familiar TMBG trick of making a phrase feel simultaneously throwaway and weirdly permanent, the way ‘Ana Ng’ or ‘Purple Toupee’ seemed to have escaped from a dream encyclopedia.

Then comes Devo in a blender in French for ‘Je N’en Ai Pas’, while ‘Outside Brain’ would be The Ramones if the song pressed the accelerator. This is where the album’s restless machinery starts to whirr properly. One minute it is cartoon punk, the next it is vaudeville science fiction, the next a radio jingle.

Not everything hits the mark, of course. ‘Telescope’ and ‘Garbage In’ major in the kind of mildly irritating diversions that fans either love or just put up with. They are very much part of the band’s ecosystem, but not every fungus in the forest needs admiring. Yet just as impatience begins to tap its foot, ‘Get Down’ gets close to that elusive banger status, all near hooks and dancefloor alarm bells. It is cautionary, catchy and odd enough to be more than merely functional.

“Intelligence and wit”

‘New Wave Will Never Die’ carries its joke in the title, but also its thesis. Of course it will not die. Not while bands such as They Might Be Giants keep feeding it batteries. ‘Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)’ adds FM rock to the mix in a fully satisfactory manner, as though Todd Rundgren, Cheap Trick and 10cc had been asked to write a song about the foolishness of expectation.

Best of all, perhaps, is ‘Character Flaw’, the closest the album gets to a trademark nagging earworm. “People go out of their way to miss my character flaw / It’s the flawiest flaw that you have ever saw,” sings Flansburgh, in a line that is ridiculous, elegant and annoyingly difficult to evict from your cranium. It is classic TMBG: funny until it becomes bleak, bleak until it becomes funny again.

So, no obvious ‘Birdhouse’ this time. No clean knockout. But there is more brilliant wilful absurdity, intelligence and wit than most bands manage across a career. An absence of ideas has never been a They Might Be Giants problem. As closer ‘They Might Be Feral’ puts it: “There’s nothing good in compromise.” Quite right. More power to them. Here is (yet) another memorable, inventive trip into their unique multiverse.

Ellie Victor( Writer )

Ellie has spent over three decades dissecting riffs, rhythms, and rockstar egos, all in pursuit of the perfect review. Her music writing journey began at 12 with a glowing 10/10 diary entry for Echo and the Bunnymen, and she’s been chasing that high ever since. Armed with encyclopaedic knowledge and a soft spot for the sonically daring, Ellie will review anything that’s put in front of her – as long as it’s on vinyl.