About
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.”
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.
