It was just a good year ago that post -industrial Homeetown Blues appeared, Big Special’s debut album. Since then, the Tories have been voted out in the United Kingdom, the home country of the duo from the gray workers’ city of Birmingham, but there is also a lot to say under a Labor government.
Recommendations of the editorial team
You still don’t know any way out of everyday despair
Also on their second album National Average, Joe Hicklin and Callum Moloney are making the Sleaford mods competition as seismographs of British sensitivity, albeit from a shifted perspective: instead of a dreary job, Big Special are now successful. Hicklin’s spitting singing is nevertheless grim, Moloney tracts his drums further in the beat of heavy machines and turbo capitalism is still shit (“professionals”).
You still don’t know any way out of everyday despair (“Hug a bastard”) and certainly not a good reason to get up in the morning (“Judas Song”). National Average is not as frenetic as the debut, rather the document of a national depression, even the way out has been excited. Not only musically, when the tracks are rather threatening, grinding hard like “Pig’s Pudding” and rarely tipping into the pub -roar. There is even a meta level in “God Save the Pony” and “Shop Music” when Hicklin bills with his own pop star and the pop business: he is too much in demand to finally have a number one hit. Or at least a nice advertising contract? We would sell everything because: “You can’t eat art.” No, you can’t eat art, but maybe change something with her
This review was first published in the MusikExpress 08/2025.