Sleaford Mods

“We’re going down like B.H.S.,” Jason Williamson spoke-sung over throbbing bass and an insistent drum machine in 2017, referring to the historic British department store dismantled by corporate greed. “While the able-bodied vultures monitor and pick at us.” Indeed, long before insipid protest music became a currency of Instagram reels, Williamson and producer Andrew Fearn were railing against unchecked capitalism, unashamed bros, and unabashed normalcy as Sleaford Mods. Williamson had already been sneering at the system as Sleaford Mods for years when he met Fearn, who began building basic beats from old drum machines and half-dead keyboards, the restrained results suggesting the patience of a ticking bomb. They didn’t quit their day jobs for years, with Fearn sticking to the gym he marketed and Williamson doling out government aid. But as Brexit and Trump began to dominate headlines, Sleaford Mods became an internationally essential band, grabbing the microphone and gripping the gear to send up the strongmen and dose it all with very wry humor.

No subject is safe from Williamson. In his East Midlands brogue, forever stuck between incensed and amused, he’s hurled insults at other bands, dragoons of dudes, folks who don’t dress quite as well as him, himself, and, of course, the powerful and uncaring, those whose wealth costs the rest of us. Where “Megaton,” from 2026’s The Demise of Planet X, lampooned our social media performances, “Big Burt,” from the pre-pandemic missive Eton Alive, chastised music magazines and chronic complainers alike. The key to the efficacy, though, may be the way that Fearn never gets too loud, too aggressive, too dramatic; he lets his minimal beats ride like time itself, allowing Williamson to send up his irritations like he’s just delivering the news, like he’s just telling us that this is the way it is. Suspended between hip-hop and post-punk, between stand-up comedy and a sermon for the secular, Sleaford Mods makes us sit with some uncomfortable truths—and laugh at it, at least a little.