When The Karma Effect was quietly born in the pandemic, vocalist Henry Gottelier could hear in his head how he wanted the project to sound. From the organic rootsy debut, followed by the show-stopping Promised Land, they now truly arrive with their third record. This is the album he dreamed of making: the most complete, crystal-clear realisation of their ambitions yet. It’s leaner, louder, heavier, blazing with determination, and joyously larger-than-life.

Although some line-up changes occurred in the background (which sees Nathan Keevil join them on bass, Alan Taylor on drums, and Tom Pitt on keys), a turn of events that could have left them on shaky ground has instead been spun into a silver lining. Brimming with energy and fresh perspectives, the newly assembled line-up convened at The Hive Rooms, in the locale of Gatwick Airport, to nail down what would become ‘Cruel Intentions’ in July 2025.

“We holed up in there, locked the doors and didn’t come out for a month,” Henry jests. “I didn’t see the sun that summer at all.” He had brought his new colleagues sketches of the album’s songs, and although their backbones largely remained as he had written them, they were sculpted by the hands of everyone in the band, making it, first and foremost, a collaborative effort capturing shards of everyone’s style and personality.

There are different shades to their sound on this outing. Henry’s songwriting leans towards the observational more than the personal. This time, there’s a dark passion coursing through these songs, preoccupied with notions of love, lust and the thrumming sense of danger in both.

Take the swaggering ‘Dangerous Love’ – “It’s about doing things you shouldn’t do, but you can’t stop yourself: passion overtaking your senses and your mind getting away from you.” The title track, meanwhile, is about a stalker. It’s not entirely steeped in darkness, however – sometimes, there are flashes of cheekiness. ‘Better Luck Next Time’, for example, is a tongue-in-cheek meditation on feeling the sharp end of sod’s law, following someone’s day as it spirals into the stuff of farce. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Henry reasons. “We know what we are in terms of the kind of music we play.”

Henry terms the band’s modus operandi “modern vintage”, a desire to polish up the retro sounds they were raised on into a gleaming, modern product instead of trying to rehash or recycle them, and certainly without falling into the trap of pastiche. Regardless, their sights are set higher, and in possession of what they believe are their strongest songs yet, they’re hungrier to chase their goals than ever.

“We want to be a stadium rock band,” he asserts. “The way I’ve always written music and performed is with the objective of: ‘How can we take what we do to this club full of people and make them feel like they’re watching something in a giant stadium in New Jersey, or something like that. I want them to feel like the band that they’re seeing is not just putting on a gig. They’re putting on a massive show.”

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