VIA PRESS RELEASE | Legendary British duo Sleaford Mods are pleased to announce a new album, UK GRIM, out March 10, 2023 on Rough Trade Records. The album will be available on LP, CD, and cassette, including black and white vinyl on the webstore, and an exclusive silver vinyl variant available via independent record stores. Sleaford Mods will tour North America this April in support of the new record, with stops in most major cities and appearances at both weekends of Coachella.
Lead track “UK GRIM” is out now and is accompanied by the first-ever music video created by British collage artist and satirist Cold War Steve, who has previously done covers for Time magazine and The New Statesman. The track continues Sleaford Mods’ uncanny ability to call out our times with anger and art, electronic innovation and erudite vision. Though no strangers to the dancefloor, the track’s minimal yet immersive beats add a physical power to the duo’s ever-insightful take on society.
War, rising energy costs, inflation. A sclerotic political class and a divided country. Malaise, acts of national self-harm and other doomed flights from reality. Despair, anger and alienation. Has it ever been worse out there?
Welcome to UK GRIM. Building on the unique, insurrectionary strengths of previous records while refining them in gripping new ways, Sleaford Mods’ newest album is a stunning step up. This is nothing less than a defining band and a voice of the people—like The Jam, The Clash, or Public Enemy were—more fully realized than ever before. It is, unmistakably, the real deal.
Begun in the lockdowns of 2021, added to at JT Soars (the band’s go to work space), and finished at musical brain Andrew Fearn’s home studio, UK GRIM finds Fearn and Sleaford Mods’ soulful ranter-inquisitor Jason Williamson at their most immaculately enraged, disquieting and ferociously poetic. Following 2021’s Spare Ribs, it is, like all their records, a diagnosing of the sicknesses of society, a psychological blot test where the listener finds themselves revealed.
Williamson says Covid ennui, life online, and experience of how the music industry works all folded into the album: however it happened, this could still be the angriest Sleaford Mods record yet.
Since they broke out with 2014’s Divide and Exit, Sleaford Mods have had increasing opportunity for frank exchanges, at home and abroad. A tireless working band, their maxi-minimalist live shows notably included a homecoming at the 10,000-capacity Nottingham Motorpoint Arena in 2021: other landmarks in their rise include US late night TV appearances, headlining festivals, and charting across Europe with Spare Ribs.
As with Spare Rib’s collaborations with Billy Nomates and Amy Taylor, other hands help with UK GRIM. Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw guests on the ghoulish “Force 10 From Navarone”: an admiring Williamson says, “She really does remind me of the early stuff that I used to do, just the way she uses one word to convey a whole story.” Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell raps on the bizarro “So Trendy,” a song Williamson says he’s “very wary of… a really weird track.”
As stages, horizons and output continue to grow, Sleaford Mods will continue to do this, as a self-sustaining model of unmitigated artistic integrity. Says Fearn. “If there’s stuff there, we’ll keep going. It’s like what Andy Warhol said—just make it, don’t overthink it. Then you’ll make those connections happen.”
