- While the Nottingham, England duo Sleaford Mods have existed in some form or another since 2007, it wasn’t until 2013’s Austerity Dogs that the band began to receive broader attention. That album was a brutally honest snapshot of English working-class reality for the ripped-off victims of trickle-down economics. It was harsh, funny, musically simple and as close to punk as you could get in the early 2010s.

English Tapas marks the tenth album-length release from the band, and it still manages to sound fresh, despite the ingredients being more or less the same as usual: Andrew Fearn’s repetitive electronic drums, punchy, post-punk bass, the occasional high-pitched beepy keyboard notes, and of course the eternally-irritated Jason Williamson rap-talking/barking his heavily-accented East Midlands vernacular over the top. It’s a simple recipe, but it continues to be damn satisfying. Especially given the context within which English Tapas arrives.

Because this is of course the first Sleaford Mods release post-Brexit, and this band is perhaps the perfect vessel to voice the confusion and frustration of those that are fed up with the political elite but are still left out of the changing geopolitical landscape. Williamson sarcastically conveys his exasperation on Carlton Touts: “Bring back the neolibs, I'm sorry / Didn't fuckin' mean to pray for anarchy”, and sneers at the “Brex-city rollers” on Cuddly.

That’s not to say that English Tapas is any kind of protest record. It’s more of a blunt reflection of the grim state of English (and Western) class barriers in 2017. The monotony of a daily life punctuated by small highlights of consumerism is depicted in Dull: “Work like fuck, top off / No good news is all it is / Few perks, try and live your life / Fucking go berserk / We are the cheap flights / Looking at the Ferrari / On show in duty-free”. On the surface it all comes across as quite apathetic, and it is, but that’s not the full story. On Drayton Manored, Williamson proclaims that “Human beings are now adjacent lines / Like a tube map, or whatever / A mass of lines that occasionally cross each other / But never say anything / Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever”. The message is dreary, but there’s also the sense that he knows that humans can be better than this. It should be noted that the whole album is also funny as hell (Cuddly: “I had an organic chicken… / It was SHIT”).

Probably the song that best represents the album as a whole is lead single B.H.S., which takes its title from the former department store chain owned by the billionaire Sir Philip Green, who sailed off on a yacht to a Mediterranean tax haven with £400 million in dividends and leaving behind 11,000 employees without jobs and 22,000 former employees without retirement funds. The chorus hook casually depicts these events over a catchy, unadorned bass line and drumbeat. There’s no rousing call to arms. It’s just a description of a real thing that happened in real life. And it’s absurd. That’s what Sleaford Mods are good at. That and getting “fuckin’ spannered”.

- Gene Mason.