The late 70s and early 80s were pretty bleak on so many levels, and it was against the backdrop of high unemployment, strikes and blackouts that punk and post-punk emerged. As a general rule, tough times yield the best art by way of an antidote. The last decade has been sorely disappointing on this score: not that there hasn’t been lots of great music, but mainstream culture as a whole has placed a veneer over the depressingly fucked-up insanity that is the world in which we find ourselves, and the great music of the underground is, by and large, curiously introverted and apolitical.
Then again, governments and media have way and means of silencing voices of dissent, it would seem.
Sisteray’s ‘Algorithm Prison’ is a loud, snotty voice of dissent, raising two fingers to the mainstream in the true spirit of punk. And, using modern technology – the new opium of the masses – against itself, they’re able to throw their latest sonic grenade out before the dust has settled over the things that inspired it.
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Cambridge Analytica… Data farming… The Information Age… the premise of this fast and furious blast of sneering guitar-driven rebellion is that we’re all caught in an ‘Algorithm Prison’. Clocking in at just over two and a half minutes, it’s a belter, combining the pithy socio-political aesthetic of Sleaford Mods with a whole mess of raw guitars. ‘We ain’t your target market’ ought to be the ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ of 2018.
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