A maniacal laugh leads off the new Sleaford Mods release. It’s a fitting kickoff to a song called “The Good Life” on an album called The Demise of Planet X. These Brits are trying their best to keep their sanity in a world gone mad.

If I were producing the duo’s video for the song, I would have them walking down the street somewhere between a mean strut and humming along in a daydream. The second half would switch gears to somehow represent graphic imagery of my face melting off. I might need to hire Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips as a consultant to help me with that part.

That’s a long way of saying that this is, as usual, a great album by the still-innovative Sleaford Mods. I’ve been a fan since 2017 when I heard that year’s release, English Tapas, and have continued to absorb myself in the rest of their eight-album discography. It’s not easy music, but the band has consistently produced heavy, catchy, and funny music that is a mix up of The Beastie Boys and The Jam, but also still entirely its own thing because of the hardcore and ska and many other elements. A great example of that description and a good place for new listeners to start is the haunting, industrial, and soulful “Mork n Mindy” from 2021’s Spare Ribs.

But back to The Demise of Planet X. This unexplored place has been memorialized across pop culture by the likes of Guided by Voices and the Fantastic Four. But here, the Mods use the planet as a metaphor for our current state of geopolitical affairs, social rot, smartphone addiction, and mass health emergencies.

Sleaford Mods writes a lot about how we humans are merely existing in mostly meaningless ways. In the plodding “Double Diamond,” my reading is that the narrator is a drug dealer or a sex worker on crack (I’m not quite sure which) who is screaming at someone who doesn’t even have the gumption to get a pie for a friend, which would “only take five minutes.”

It’s about this time, early in the album, that singer Jason Williamson, I suppose we could call him a rapper, starts to scare me. He grumbles and howls and screams about the dregs of modern life. I’m just saying that my first instinct after seeing a Sleaford Mods concert wouldn’t be to go hang out with them in the alley behind the venue after the show.

On record, though, I love the scary side of Williamson and his melody-master partner Andrew Fearn. I also love that they snap right back into catchy, upbeat mode on highlights like “Elitist G.O.A.T.” featuring the dreaming singing of Aldous Harding and another boy-girl duet, “No Touch” with Sue Tomkins of the band Life Without Buildings. “Flood the Zone” is another of several songs with guests, this time with the light touch of singer Liam Bailey.

If there’s any knock against Planet X, it’s that it can be a lot to take in one sitting. I find myself enjoying this album in three or four song snippets. Getting screamed at with a finger in the face can be off-putting, especially if it goes on too long. That said, we live in an off-putting world and it’s a great thing to have Sleaford Mods here to call us out on our ills.

pre-order The Demise Of Planet X by Sleaford Mods HERE