SLEAFORD-MODS-THE-DEMISE-OF-PLANET-X-ALBUM-2025.
Dave Simpson of the Guardian who for me is a certainty gave 4 stars out of 5 to “The Demise Of Planet X” the new album by SLEAFORD MODS. I had no doubts about it.
The Good Life it was one of my favorite songs of last year and if a good morning starts in the morning, Sleaford Mods have decided to set off the alarm clock with this record.
Jason Williamson (born '70) and Andrew Fearn (born '71) on their thirteenth spin on the Sleaford Mods ride are now operating outside linear time. Despite two decades of militancy, they retain a proletarian arrogance that humiliates the new generation of academic post-punk through detachment.
In “The Demise Of Planet X”Fearn's aesthetics of subtraction evolves: the usual electro-punk skeleton, rough and obsessive, is here violated and his sound library is expanded by orchestral additions and strings that do not serve to embellish, but to underline, by contrast, the desolation of the landscape described. It is an expanded minimalism, an echo chamber where the orchestra seems to play among the wreckage of a post-industrial Britain.
It is grafted onto this substrate spoken word by Williamson, a stream of consciousness that has the effect of a bucket of ice water spilled on a group of newbie wankers!
Here it is no longer just a matter of spitting on neoliberalism between a beer and a subsidy, but of mapping the ruins of a country that Williamson describes as a
corpse torn apart by war and social media”.
His is not a sterile tirade, but a cultured invective that demolishes the aporias of contemporaneity. Williamson articulates contempt with a metric that transforms everyday life into an epic of decline that goes from smartphone addiction, to geopolitical decline, from ferocious criticism of the MAGA world to the condemnation of the aesthetics of social media.
Even the choice of guests follows a functional and surprising logic. Gwendoline Christie, Big Special, Aldous Harding, Sue Tompkins, Liam Bailey, Snowy: presences that on paper would seem far from the Mods universe, but which in the economy of the record act as conceptual amplifiers. Not cameos, but controlled fractures that widen the perimeter of the work without distorting it.
There is no trace of creative tiredness, nor mannerism. Sleaford Mods remain the only project capable of transforming cynicism into a necessary art form, eschewing the cliché of “worker rage” to embrace a brutal, almost ruthless analytical lucidity. Here we don't protest: we diagnose.
“The Demise Of Planet X” he doesn't ask to simply be listened to. It demands to be quoted, memorized, used as an unofficial manifesto of our imminent end. A record that does not console and does not promise redemption. And for this very reason, indispensable.
SCORE: 8.00
TO LISTEN NOW
The Good Life – Elitest GOAT – Kill List
TO BE SKIPPED IMMEDIATELY
Nothing! A burst of energy to listen to at full volume!
TRACKLIST
The Good Life feat. Gwendoline Christie + Big Special
Double Diamond
Elitest GOAT feat. Aldous Harding
Megaton
No Touch feat. Sue Tompkins
Bad Santa
The Demise Of Planet
Don Draper
Gina Was
Shoving the Images
Flood the Zone feat. Liam Bailey
Kill List feat. Snowy
The Unwrap
