The Pop Corporation

Post Punk always had a dog in the fight. That was always kinda the point, right? From Gang Of Four’s leftie funk, to The Fall’s derelict shopping precincts and alcoholic bookwormery, to Siouxsie’s genuinely otherness, you always felt it was bands with some skin in the game.

While punk could often feel like middle class tourists playing at poverty porn, the rock music that sprung from it at least seemed to free itself from such things by having a broader musical spectrum, incorporating German psychedelic rock, jazz, dub, disco and whatever else into a sound that lacked a universally agreed-upon definition, while maintaining a certain DIY charm.

Through the ’90s, Post Punk’s influence was still evident but moved to one side as America embraced Grunge and the UK adopted a more melodic approach, but it wouldn’t be long before a techy post 9/11 world saw the need for something a bit more scratchy and tense.

And so came the Dirty Disco and Punk Funk of LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, Franz Ferdinand, Mclusky, !!!, and a raft of others who shot some joy into their avant garde, to offer light relief from the Landfill Indie that had stunk up the charts (and is currently having a very interesting revival thanks to the cyclical nostalgia circuit).

Gone were the bootcut jeans and in came the skinny ties and spray-on jeans, as musicians looked toward NYC for Indie Sleaze, and kicked against the excesses of Nu Metal and Hip Hop. If you were young and wanted to get your rocks off, you were more likely to do it the Yeah Yeah Yeahs than you were Travis – if you wanted to dance, then you’d get more traction with Futureheads than Turin Brakes.

During this time, a revival of Post Punk, the emergence of Indie Sleaze, NYC indie, grot rock bands like The Libertines, were still writing enough choruses to feel like pop, rather than someone indebted to Wire records and The Fall, but that would all turn on a sixpence when Sleaford Mods arrived.

Agitated, foul mouthed and stark, Sleaford Mods arrived in the middle of absolutely everything going wrong, and rock critics from public schools and North London suburbs couldn’t co-sign them quickly enough. Finally, someone had taken punk’s approach and actively modernised it. Three chords and write a song? How about a pissed off frontman and a bloke vaping next to a laptop, and nothing else? Postpostpunk even!

Soon enough, there was enough caché for record companies to start opening their chequebooks and issuing some Monzo cards, and a slew of groups arrived and music writers started using the word Sprechgesang, which means ‘spoken singing’, or if you prefer, the death of the chorus.

Enter hipster nepo baby (and proud of it!) Baxter Dury, Fountaines DC, Idles, Dry Cleaning, Yard Act, Black Country New Road, Wet Leg, representative of some kind of Post Brexit, Pro Malaise Britain, offering vaguely cryptic lyrics to soundtrack everyone’s lack of ability to get a handle on where things were going wrong in the world.

While Kneecap’s rave-rap directly pointed at the sources of evil, the Landfill Post Punk crowd sing “Tokyo bouncy ball, Oslo bouncy ball, Rio de Janeiro bouncy ball filter” – words don’t have to mean anything of course, and nonsense in pop is long and storied, so any criticism of the content is imagined, even if some of those criticisms hold weight.

Where OG Post Punk deconstruction of rock felt in itself an attack on the worldview of Reagan and Thatcher, in 2026, using the same tools feels almost like Traditional Rock N Roll. Like, if it’s been revived already in the Noughties, is it really the avant garde in the 2020s? Maybe it isn’t trying to be, and it’s just a bunch of kids making a joyful racket.

Either way, if Landfill Indie was a term coined to describe a mildly pretentious version of traditional rock music, then you could argue that this interation of Post Punk could be criticised in the same way. The only difference between Landfill Indie and Landfill Post Punk, is the ecosystem of rock criticism – one lived in a scene filled with sniffy writers and music publications, the other in an industry filled with middle class writers who can afford to not get paid a whole bunch, and it seems the latter are giving the current crop of indie darlings an easier ride than those who came before them. It’s easier to be kinder on musicians when someone’s paying your rent for you, right? Especially so if those bands feel like they come from a similar background as you – why on earth would you be annoyed at someone being accused of being an industry plant if you’re a journalism plant yourself?

That all said, doesn’t punk of all stripes have a problem, since it’s inception, with the university classes creating music and celebrating itself through its concurrent music critics?

Never trust someone who can pass off whatever they do as some ‘art school prank’ – never trust someone who prefers general sarcasm over actively challenging power. Is being nonchalant an option from 2026 onwards?

We see a lot of talk about late-stage Capitalism around these groups, and about how it is such a psychedelically strange thing to wrap your head around, that of course these groups can’t formulate an active takedown of it and that, it’s probably unfair for anyone to ask them to do so. However, you can’t rely on post-modernism for too much, especially when the music you’re making isn’t exactly deconstructing the modern rock song in any way.

But sure, let the kids have their fun in dark times. These bands, like Landfill Indie groups, are operating in an impossible situation where snooty articles like this one ask questions they may not have wanted to address in the first place. If all that is required is some noisy guitars and the chance to forget the encroaching horrors of the world for an hour or so, then these groups like every popular group that came before them serve some purpose.

If you want to ironically shout “mother!” or “daddy!” at these shows, then knock yourself out. There’s enough going on that’s bad, that it’d be churlish to berate anyone having a good time in the face of a very bad time indeed.

With all that said, it feels like we’re in the bottleneck, and people with a platform are being much more direct when talking about the likes of ICE, Gaza, Trump, Fascist revivalism, billionaires, the environment, artificial intelligence, personal freedoms and the rest. It seems like we’re exiting the latest version of Post Punk, and moving toward something else.

As ever, pop fans will have their ear to the ground and we’ll find a new way to channel what’s going on through music.