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No need to worry, it’s only the end of the world... welcome to The Demise Of Planet X.
Having put the Do into DIY in a 15 year (and counting) career that has seen their idiosyncratic but irresistible blueprint of minimal electronics and maximal insight adopted as a creative manifesto by a generation of artists following in their wake, while evolving from lo-fi beginnings to Top 5 albums, sold out tours and festival headline slots, who better than Sleaford Mods’ Andrew Fearn and Jason Wiliamson to chart civilisation’s unravelling?
Having perceptively weaved jutting electro into their explorations along society’s fault lines, as you’d expect, their eighth album, The Demise Of Planet X, offers a uniquely Sleaford Mods vision of Armageddon. Eschewing the usual end-of-days tropes, the duo has instead reasoned that it will be the drip, drip, drip decline of social ennui, cultural entropy and selfish corruption that will take us out long before the supernova.
Triggered by the unruly scenes at a Midlands nightclub Williamson witnessed in the mid-2000s – and has never quite shaken – Planet X muses around the fear that rather than a Mad Max-style, bacchanalian blowout, the apocalypse might instead manifest itself in a haze of unravelling, repetitive mundanity. Forget biker gangs and cyborgs, perhaps the planet’s real undoing will just be a process of things just slowly getting shittier and shittier.
“I remember walking into that club, and it was like the world had ended, started again and gone rotten again all in one go. You’d gone past Armageddon, and this was what the world would look like afterwards,” recalls Williamson, who in the course of writing this record became struck that ‘the same but worse’ wouldn’t be an inaccurate way to describe how things are going at the moment.
“That's how everything I see around me at the minute kind of feels,” he continues, considering the daily degradation that has stalked the globe since our emergence from lockdown. “We are flogging a dead horse, so to speak, with mass consumption and chasing money, while parts of the world are completely falling to bits that the West just ignores. It’s as if we’ve skipped Armageddon and gone straight to what the world looks like afterwards.”
Trump tantrums and global standoffs naturally cast a shadow over this imagined endgame, but everyday concerns like supermarkets and server farms, crippling self-doubt and nagging irritations are also unstitching society’s fabric. Whereas Sodom and Gomorrah were biblically smote from the earth for their wickedness, their modern-day counterparts are being erased one missed online delivery at a time, as Planet X’s demise proves profound, personal, but prosaic.
Still, while the world might be going out with a whimper rather than a bang, the opposite is true of The Demise Of Planet X. Akin to how Judgement Day visions inspired Hieronymus Bosch’s most vivid and wonderful paintings, ‘Demise...’ has yielded some of Sleaford Mods’s most complete and expressive work so far. The anger and the wit, the beats and bleeps still sear with the Nottingham duo’s customary uncompromising energy, but across the album they are augmented by new ideas and collaborators that add a fresh depth, empathy and guile to the band.
Aptly, opening track The Good Life shows how horizons have widened on this album while the group’s identity and impact remain as direct as ever. Fearn’s bass groove surges with trademark ferocity, but his choice of an almost disco beat offers a new shade of warmth. Similarly, Williamson’s rapid narration continues to hit hard with linguistic precision, but he is joined by actress Gwendoline Christie (Severance/Game Of Thrones) and Big Special to give voice to his inner thoughts. The latter’s calm croon extols the benefits of a happy, ‘good life ’which contrasts with Christie’s gloriously unhinged rap encapsulating the self-loathing and bewilderment inspired by the self-destructive urges that continually pop up to shatter this mental harmony. It is Sleaford Mod kitchen-sink drama, re-staged in a mind palace.
In part, working in studios like Abbey Road for the first time, alongside Bristol’s Invada and their usual base at Nottingham’s JT Soars, contributed to the record’s breath, as new equipment and instruments were available to the duo, but this approach in itself is an expression of the rethinking Fearn and Williamson have undertook over how they go about being Sleaford Mods.
Whereas on their other records, Fearn has overseen every aspect of recording, on this album, he was assisted on the engineering side at the studios they visited, allowing him to re-channel his creative energies.
“Previously, he would spend a lot of time on the engineering, so we said ‘let’s try something different,’ and he got on with the production,” recalls Williamson. “We were at Abbey Road in March, working on Elitest G.O.A.T. and Flood The Zone, which I’d originally sent him as ideas on an acoustic guitar, and that’s when the sonics really started to change. He was able to concentrate on the production with me, which really opened things up. What he introduced to those songs were things I’d never have thought of. I’d envisaged them as these gritty garage bumps – I was listening to the Ramones’ first album a lot – but he turned them into something starry, almost Northern Soul-y. After that, things really shifted up.”
Enthused by this change of gear, Williamson found himself writing new songs ahead of their next sessions to capitalise on the new possibilities, taking inspiration from the likes of The Specials, The Selector and, he freely admits, his own tears.
“I’ve been crying a lot more, not too much, but it’s been a game changer,” explains Williamson of how the work he is doing for his mental health has encouraged a wider emotional spectrum across his lyrics. “I was on holiday the other week and I just cried while having a meal because I was happy. It’s fucking weird, but it has helped because I’m finally starting to connect with emotions.”
As a result of these fundamental shifts, The Demise Of Planet X is still resolutely a Sleaford Mods album, but it is one that goes to places the duo have never reached before.
The chiming Elitest G.O.A.T. brings Aldous Harding into the band’s orbit, her light-as-a-cloud vocal, juxtaposing sweetly with Wiliamson’s sandpaper rap, while at the suggestion of their label, Rough Trade, No Touch finds the frontman duetting with Sue Tompkins of the much-missed Life Without Buildings. Boasting a strikingly endearing heart, the pair’s distinctly human voices intertwine over a slinky bass and music box keyboard motif.
Nottingham singer-songwriter Liam Bailey adds a soulful lament to world-weary MAGA takedown Flood The Zone; while rapper Snowy – also from the duo’s hometown – drops some decisive bars on The Kill List’s horror hip hop (its central imagery inspired by the film of the same name directed by the band’s friend and sometime collaborator Ben Wheatley).
“With the people we invited on this album, we were almost using them as an instrument,” suggests Williamson of how their collaborators contributed to the process of expanding the band’s palette. “You like their stuff, you know their voices, so it was a case of approaching them with an idea we knew would work. They all really helped us. Sue Tompkins, for example, we didn’t know before she came down to Bristol to record with us, but she had all these little quirky one-liners we put at the start and end of the song, and it came together in an hour.”
Fearn and Williamson’s one-on-one work is equally inventive. Bad Santa cunningly explodes the return of Trump and the misguided notions of toxic masculinity with perhaps Sleaford Mods’ most reflective atmosphere yet, while the school days flashback of Gina Was opens with some raw spoken words before its bouncy rap kicks in, making The Demise Of Planet X an album of truly enticing depths and shade – not that the pair’s traditional bite is lacking.
Mutating The Magic Roundabout theme, the title track impressively repurposes the plot of Shirley Valentine as an allegory for England’s flag-shagging decline, while first single Megaton ticks with menacing electronics as it digs out cultural mediocrity, killing clichés with every beat.
It is fair to say ‘demise’ has never sounded so vibrant, varied and... alive. “I don't want to pat myself on the back while the rest of the world falls to shit,” smiles Williamson, “but I’m really happy with The Demise Of Planet X. It's not just in your face, you have to really put your glasses on to look at the ingredients.”
With its musical nuance and a critique of our times that reaches from the corridors of power to the dark corners of the mind, Sleaford Mods have made an illuminating and affecting album that will last until the end of time... whenever that happens to be.
