The Probies presents: Sorry We're Closed
sorry not sorry !!
'Sorry We're Closed' by The Probies is taken from the new album Bits & Bobs out now.
'Sorry We’re Closed' hinges on a deceptively simple conceit: repetition as decay. What begins as a deadpan inventory of shuttered shops slowly metastasises into something colder, more existential—less high street, more psychic lockdown.
Musically, The Probies sit in an odd pocket. The groove lurches rather than drives, a slightly off-kilter pulse that recalls the slacker elasticity of Pavement spliced with the mechanical insistence of early post-punk. There’s a sense that the rhythm section is deliberately resisting tightness—dragging just behind the beat, creating that queasy, unsettled swing. It’s not quite danceable, not quite inert; instead, it hovers in that uncomfortable middle ground where repetition becomes a kind of low-grade hypnosis.
The guitars play it smart. Clean, almost nonchalant at first, they sketch the melody with minimal fuss before opening into a more expressive, melodic solo that feels oddly detached emotionally—more observational than cathartic. There’s no grand climax, no release. Even the solo seems aware that it’s trapped inside the same loop as everything else.
Lyrically, the track thrives on escalation through banality. “The grocer’s shop… the baker’s shop…” reads like a childlike list, but the accumulation builds an atmosphere of quiet suffocation. Each “sorry we’re closed” lands with increasing weight, less apologetic, more absolute. By the time the Eiffel Tower is declared closed—a surreal, faintly humorous twist—the song slips from realism into something more symbolic: institutions, landmarks, infrastructures, all rendered inaccessible.
The real pivot arrives with “And your heart is still closed.” Up until then, the closures are external, almost comedic in their mundanity. That line collapses the outside world into the interior. Suddenly, the refrain isn’t about shops at all—it’s about emotional inaccessibility, withdrawal, perhaps even numbness. The repetition gains a new cruelty here, each iteration reinforcing distance rather than describing it.
There’s also a streak of bleak, almost flippant nihilism running through the later lines. “The son of God, sorry he’s closed” teeters between irony and resignation, suggesting not rebellion but absence—no divine outlet, no salvation hotline. When the song finally mutters “Life is a living hell,” it doesn’t feel melodramatic; it feels earned through accumulation, as if the phrase has been worn down into a dull, factual statement.
The refusal to resolve is arguably the point. Even the closing question—“So what’s left for me to do?”—hangs unanswered, swallowed by the instrumental outro. No breakthrough, no reopening. Just the same groove, quietly circling.
In the end, 'Sorry We’re Closed' doesn’t explode; it withholds. And in that restraint, it captures something distinctly contemporary: the slow, numbing realisation that everything—systems, connections, even the self—might simply remain shut.
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