Hard-Fi fire off Good For Nothing before December

Sweating Someone Else’s Fever, their first studio album in fifteen years, is already out on V2 — three UK headline nights follow in early December.

Hard-Fi release Good For Nothing on Monday 5 October. The track is the latest single from Sweating Someone Else’s Fever, the Staines band’s first studio album in fifteen years, which came out on 19 June 2026 via V2 Records.

The song is built on memorable indie hooks, beefy instrumentation and Richard Archer’s driving vocals. It follows an earlier cut from the same record, They Ain’t Your Friends, and keeps the album in front of listeners as the group turn towards a short run of UK headline nights in December.

Fifteen years, then a full-length

For a band still closely tied in the public ear to Hard to Beat, the silence between studio albums was long. Sweating Someone Else’s Fever closed that gap. The record was written and recorded in 2025 at Cherry Lips, Hard-Fi’s own studio, and produced by Archer with Wolsey White. That arrangement left the writing and the tracking in the band’s hands from the start, at home rather than recorded in a hired studio.

The release through V2 placed a full new Hard-Fi album back in shops and on streaming services in the middle of the year. They Ain’t Your Friends had already given the record its first public shape. Good For Nothing is the latest single drawn from it, arriving well after the album and aimed as much at the weeks before the live dates as at the long-form listen.

In that sense the single is not a trailer. The album is out. What Monday’s track does is extend the campaign: another song with weight in the arrangement and a vocal sat forward, chosen to travel from the studio into the rooms the band will play in December. The hooks are built to stick; the instrumentation is thick; Archer’s voice drives the centre. It is a practical single for a group about to test the new material on stage.

Brixton, Birmingham, Manchester

Hard-Fi have announced three UK headline dates for early December. The run opens at O2 Academy Brixton on 3 December, moves to O2 Institute Birmingham on 4 December, and finishes at O2 Ritz Manchester on 5 December. Three cities on three consecutive nights form a tight itinerary rather than a long tour — a concentrated return to the circuit with the new songs in the set.

Brixton, Birmingham and Manchester are a familiar spine for a British guitar band with a catalogue audience. For listeners in Ireland who have kept Hard-Fi on the playlist since Hard to Beat, these are the nights that will show how Sweating Someone Else’s Fever sits beside the older material in a live room. Nothing beyond those three shows has gone on sale; no further leg has been announced.

Monday’s single keeps the album warm in the short gap before those gigs. With the full-length already out since June, Good For Nothing reads as a further statement of intent rather than a first signal: the band are still adding tracks to the public picture, still deciding which songs lead the way into December.

What is not yet known is whether more singles will follow, or whether the December run will grow into further dates in the new year. For now the frame is fixed — a studio return after a decade and a half, issued in the summer on V2; a further single at the start of October; and three headline nights in the first week of December, beginning at Brixton and ending in Manchester.

Tour dates

Hard Fi will tour the UK in December. Tickets are on sale now.

Hard Fi's upcoming UK dates are:

DECEMBER 2026

1 – Bristol, The Fleece
3 – London, O2 Academy Brixton
4 – Birmingham, O2 Institute
5 – Manchester, O2 Ritz