Here’s an alternative to the aggro punk poetry of Sleaford Mods: for their fifth album, Dutch Uncles have captured the cold, industrial grind of being broke and betrayed in austerity Britain. After 2015’s O Shudder – an odyssey into awkward sex – the Salford band have shed some of their lithe, shoulder-pad pop for something burlier and with greater intent: inspired by Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes, Low-era Bowie and eastern European techno, its songs barge in with urgency: Big Balloon is a song about antidepressants, its wobbling ascent firing out the type of energy that can’t be sustained, while Same Plane Dream, a song about benefit cuts, careens in a panic, instruments crammed in like a cluster headache. Beauty lies amid the twitchy paranoia – Streetlight is a moment of elegant Manchester romance, and throughout there are jangly, Marr-style guitars that slice into the darkness like light escaping through the slats of a blind.
