Are we there yet? Have we reached post-pandemic karma? Clearly not in literal terms, but for Kurt Wagner – he who is now and has always been the ever evolving, impossible-to-define Lambchop – there may unwittingly be an expiration date on the music which the biggest global crisis in a century has spawned. Speaking in the run-up to the release of the collective’s sixteenth record, the grizzled 61-year-old questioned the longevity of material written inside this maze of confused feelings, doubting himself whether some of it will be able in hindsight to escape its own gravity. Ever the contrarian, and following a kind of eat-your-own-dog-food logic, Showtunes explores the reverse idea of sound as timelessness via the themes, if not the format, of how the expanded idea of theatre and performance can lend new aspects to music itself.