“Theresa May, do you know how it feels to count days and hours till payday?” So goes London duo Farai’s single This Is England, a foreboding, state-of-the-nation address that berates the “toffs” over a minimal drum kick and scathing static – skeletal post-punk with the confrontational freeform intoning of a beat poet. It probably isn’t the kind of stuff that’ll get to No 1, but their bleak punctuation of Brexit Britain updates post-punk for millennial malaise.
Farai are Farai Bukowski-Bouquet and Tony “Tone” Harewood, whose origin story couldn’t be any more east London if you served it open on a brioche bun. She was a jazz singer and part of Shop Floor Sessions, a collective of musicians and poets who squatted a shop where they hosted jam nights. He was a musician in various indie-pop bands, until they met up at Dalston’s Gillett Square and spent the night recording at Harewood’s home studio.
Farai have previously released on Non Worldwide, a collective of African artists that gives a platform to marginalised diasporic voices. Farai’s 2017 Kisswell EP stood out by a country mile, especially the grisly stomp Lion Warrior, where Bukowski-Bouquet blasts: “I am not local/ I am global”, suggesting their music is for the disaffected everywhere. A forthcoming debut album for Big Dada, Rebirth, has more of the same weird and wavy noise, surveying the daily grind and discontent, the generation divide and gentrification, with the occasional techno flourish. If Shane Meadows were looking to soundtrack his next project, he’d find plenty of inspiration here.
• Rebirth is released on Big Dada on 30 November
