A funhouse is a specific kind of ride: distorting mirrors, floors that tilt without warning, a design built entirely around not letting you settle into one feeling for long. Ungus Ungus Ungus have spent seven albums and over a decade of festival stages, Woodford, Port Fairy, Rainbow Serpent, and a long list beyond, building a sound that works the same way, and The Fun House is the record where that ride metaphor finally becomes the whole architecture. Bandleader Max Schollar-Root has described the approach as playing fast and loose with genre on purpose, and across eight tracks the band moves through circus-party freak folk, psychedelic dub, funk, electro swing, drum and bass, and ambient stillness without ever settling long enough to be pinned down.
Opener “Funlerable” announces that instability in its own title, a portmanteau splicing fun and vulnerable together before a single lyric arrives. When the song asks, flatly, “have you ever had fun,” and answers itself, “I have, I have,” the repetition doesn’t read as simple joy. It lands closer to someone talking themselves into a memory they’re not entirely sure of, the kind of answer you give twice because the first time didn’t convince you either. That uncertainty sits underneath the track’s brassy, carnival-organ exuberance the whole way through, joy and doubt riding the same melody rather than trading off cleanly.
“Poltergeist” plays its title as a joke with real teeth. A poltergeist haunts the living without being dead itself, and the song’s narrator, left with “just my cries” while insisting “you haunt me like you’re already dead,” is describing someone who’s very much still around, just gone from the relationship. That’s a sharper premise than a standard breakup lament, grief attached to a person who hasn’t actually left the world, only the room. “Dr Quiet” leans into a different kind of irony, a title built from stillness that spends its second half telling the listener to “step into the light,” the carnival sideshow doctor archetype getting used here as a figure who diagnoses by exposure rather than by hiding you away.
“Wishes Three” is the album’s clear centerpiece, nearly nine minutes built, according to the band, around tracing the actual origins of food, a strange and specific anchor for a funk odyssey to hang on. Three wishes is old folklore shorthand, and applying that framework to something as unglamorous as where a meal actually comes from gives the song a wry distance from typical mysticism, trading magic granting desire for the unglamorous chain of labor and land behind anything landing on a plate. When the hook repeats “it’s all the same, wishes three,” it points out that abundance and scarcity have always run on the same three basic wishes, whoever’s asking, closer to an observation than a resignation.
“Secret Track” opens the record’s second half, positioned on the vinyl pressing as the start of side B, and it’s worth dwelling on since it’s easy to miss between the album’s louder centerpieces. Mysterious and mellow by design, it hands a verse to MC Flash Poetry, a genuine tonal breath after “Wishes Three” runs its full nine minutes, and its placement as a between-sides opener rather than a mid-album detour gives it more structural weight than its quiet delivery might suggest at first listen.
“Sauna Swing” and “Move” pick the energy back up in sequence, the former built on bouncing electro swing, the latter a drum and bass-driven, body-focused track featuring FemCee that turns its hook, “got to do it,” into a plain physical command rather than a metaphor. After eight tracks spent oscillating between genres and moods, “Beginnings” closes the record on ambient, meditative synth, a title that reads as a small joke on its own placement, an album ending on a song called beginnings, gently releasing the listener the same way a fairground ride slows before letting riders off.
The band’s catalog outside this record backs up the confidence on display here. A 2023 remix of their song “Balloon,” reworked by ARIA-winning producer Davide Carbone and retitled “Holding Me Now,” landed on Carl Cox’s own favorite tracks playlist, proof this project’s genre-hopping instincts translate outside their own live shows too. The Fun House doesn’t ask listeners to pick a lane any more than the band has over seven albums. It just asks them to hold on while the floor tilts.
The Fun House is available August 28th.
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