The Tubs are a British jangle-rock band, with a cheeky-dirtbag edge. The front man is a thirty-three-year-old Welshman named Owen Williams, who sounds like Richard Thompson and whose songs on the Tubs’ most recent album, “Cotton Crown,” arose out of grief over the suicide of his mother, a singer and novelist, a decade ago. The album cover is a photo of her breast-feeding him. He initially wrote but could not find a publisher for a novel about all that (“trying and failing to participate in the trauma-industrial complex,” as he has put it), but then he began having some success with the music thing, as part of a London collective of musicians who call themselves Gob Nation.

This spring, the Tubs paid thousands of dollars for a visa to tour the States. “We’re here to unite the country,” Williams said the other day. “We’re gonna come, like, three times. By that point, I think this place will start healing.” Their bass player, recovering from being run over by a car outside a London pub, couldn’t come—“He can walk around,” Williams said. “He just can’t use his hands”—so they brought in a replacement, Devon Murphy, who works on a mushroom farm in western Massachusetts. The others were Dan Lucas, the guitarist, from York, and Taylor Stewart, the drummer, from outside Glasgow—the group’s impish prankster, who has a penchant for choking his mates and kicking them in the balls.

On a recent Friday, the four Tubs arrived in New York, by van, from Washington, D.C., and went to get some restorative pints at a midtown Welsh pub called the Liberty, which has a statue out front of a Welsh dragon. They’d just finished a Southern swing. At a South Carolina club, the bartender had carded Williams, in spite of his having a beard and a place on the bill, and wouldn’t serve him the drinks he was owed for performing. Williams got the others to sneak him some beers. “I locked myself in the toilet, drinking all the rider beers, getting drunk purely out of spite,” he said. “But then, after our set, this Trump-supporter guy in the audience kept buying me shots of whiskey so we could both, like, mend this country. We were debating back and forth, in a friendly way, and then as a gesture of unity he’d buy another shot. And so I got maybe the drunkest I’ve ever been in my life. Back at the Airbnb in some really quiet neighborhood, our hosts, this sweet old Southern couple, they just were looking at us through the blinds. And I was outside, puking my guts out.”

“I tried to tell them he’s not with us, that he’s just a crazy guy in the street,” Stewart said. Stewart had never been to New York. Within a few blocks of his arrival in Manhattan, as he looked up at the Empire State Building, a guy on the sidewalk barked at him, “Pay attention, motherfucker!” Stewart carried an aluminum camera case and, as a good eater, had a to-do list for the band’s twenty-four hours in town: chopped-cheese, proper bagel, New York slice. “In the South, I had chicken-fried steak for the first time. And White Castle. Really good.” He kept thinking he’d get shot. In most towns on the tour, he got to see longtime-but-never-met friends whom he’d got to know, as he put it, “on the computer.” (“I love them,” he said.) Every now and then, he broke out of his Glaswegian burr to repeat a bit of gangster-American of his own devising: “Meet me on the corner at Eighteenth and Ninth Street, and bring a lockpick. Don’t ask any questions. Unless the question is what’s my favorite food. In which case the answer is traditional Italian spaghetti Bolognese.”

For a while now, the Tubs have been looking to incite a feud with a rival.

“We’ve been trying to start a band beef,” Williams said.

With whom?

“We don’t know yet,” Stewart said.

“The ones we keep picking turn out to be the ones we have mutual friends with,” Williams said. “So far, it’s based on just a few bands we find annoying. But I feel like you need some kind of real reason.”

“We tried to start a beef with one band—”

“And then, oh yeah, they got held up at gunpoint in the States.”

“We were going to claim that we put out a hit.”

Williams said, “Maybe we need to beef with some Welsh bands.”

“What about the Bug Club?” Lucas, the guitarist, said. “More like the Butt Plug!”

“We do like those guys,” Stewart said.

“Their songs are, like, one minute long,” Lucas said. “What’s that all about?”

“Yeah, our songs are, like, three minutes long!” Stewart said.

“I tried to give the Butt Plugs a chance, but the song was over before I could enjoy it,” Lucas said.

Williams, back in London, has a day job as an invigilator in a gallery, keeping an eye on the art. A possible song title, “Invigilator.” On the Tubs’ first album, “Dead Meat,” he has a spiky, self-lacerating number titled “Sniveller,” in which he calls himself an “ass-licker.” The Tubs were scheduled to perform it the following morning on WFMU, out of Jersey City, and had been informed that they’d have to sub in another lyric. “They said it was, like, an act,” Williams said. “It makes you visualize an act.”

Stewart, the drummer, said, “How about ‘I’m a crazy boy!’? ‘I’m a crazy boy.’ That’s the one.” He stepped outside to hit his vape, next to the dragon.

“Some of my songs are heavy,” Williams said. “But, like, because I’ve sung them so many times, I forget what they’re about. I just associate them with these fucking guys.” ♦