”IN ENGLAND NO-ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM.” UK Grim
War, rising energy costs, inflation. A sclerotic political class and a divided country. The post-Brexit malaise, acts of national self-harm and other doomed flights from reality. Despair, anger and alienation. Has it ever been worse out there?
“The rot’s set in,” says Sleaford Mods’ soulful ranter-inquisitor Jason Williamson. “So much it’s trampled into our consciousness to the point where we have become as one with the Conservative Party. We’re all Conservative MPs now… servants of this really bleak sort of Aldi nationalism.”
Welcome to UK Grim. Building on the unique, insurrectionary strengths of previous records while refining them in gripping new ways, Sleaford Mods’ twelfth album is a stunning step up. This is nothing less than a defining band and voice of their generation – like The Jam, The Clash or Public Enemy were - more fully realised than ever before. At a musical moment where so much seems to exist simply to melt into air, it is, unmistakably, the real deal.
Begun in the lockdowns of 2021, added to at JT Soars the band’s go to work space, and finished at musical brain Andrew Fearn’s home studio, UK Grim finds the group at their most immaculately enraged, disquieting and ferociously poetic. Following 2021’s Spare Ribs – their third top ten album since 2019 and their most successful yet – it is, like all their records, a diagnosing of the sicknesses of society, a panacea, and a psychological blot test where the listener finds themselves revealed.
Though largely conceived before the tumults of 2022, UK Grim eerily anticipates the convulsions of a society losing its mind, narrated by a man determined to confront hypocrisies, especially his own. 14 watertight tracks take in stripped punk, barbed electronics and haunted hip hop, and subjects as diverse as the pernicious right-wing narrative, robbing from the till at work, a recovering addict’s nostalgia for drugs and, on Apart From You, an admission of existential aloneness. They are too brutally descriptive and psychologically blunt to be simple protest songs. Williamson says Covid ennui, life online, and experience of how the music industry works all folded into the album: however it happened, this could still be the angriest Sleaford Mods record yet.