“…what we’re facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we’re all worse off, and we all have to take our share.” 

It’s an admission that can scarcely be believed. Amid the gnawing economic calamity hitting the nation and calcifying the grey spectre of malaise that doesn’t seem to ebb or dissipate, Bank of England’s Chief Economist Huw Pill reveals in a glibly condescending remark to the Columbia Law School what working-class people already knew: the system does not care for you, and you will never be able, nor can you hope, to change it. As the failed state prepares to pour millions into an archaic, regal celebration of servility and inequality, the majority of the country is still waiting for the ‘levelling up’ to materialise.

“I shout because it’s all I got left” confesses Benefits singer Kingsley Chapman on the volatile ‘Empire’, a furious seethe against the nativist confusion wrought by stately myth-making and disempowered rage. The impotent howl that rails throughout Benefits’ work has served as both a sonic and thematic foundation across their short gestation. Formed in 2019 and naming themselves after the Conservative trigger word that so plagued the early 2010s news agenda and its austerity propagation, Benefits swiftly thrust themselves firmly into UK music consciousness off the back of a string of blistering singles infused with experimental noise-punk and fiery polemics that authentically channelled the political miasma that hangs in the air.

Nails, their debut LP via Portishead’s Geoff Barrow’s Invada Records, continues their volatile exercises in electronic cacophony and breaks of terse ambience with masterful command. The slabs of clipping discord are grappled as punishingly as anything from extreme noise acts like Whitehouse or Ramleh, ‘Traitors’ awesome heft so gargantuan its industrial monolith threatens to swallow you whole. Album opener ‘Marlboro Hundereds’ too wields a similarly massive attack of bruising noise but is saturated in digital squeals and screeches showcasing keyboardist Robbie Major’s ability to demonstrate the many ways one can disorient their listener.

Despite their reputation for deafening production, it’s the moments of brittle ferment that evoke deeper depths of unease and reflects the national mood as it often is, endless meanders of alienation that encompass sudden bursts of rage. Listless beats shuffle along on the languid ‘Mindset’, an introspective wander through cultural inertia and social artifice that seem to succinctly score one’s forlorn walk through their shuttered-up home town or sleet-ridden work commute. ‘Shit Britain’ borrows Radiohead’s fractured loops from ‘The Gloaming’ and adds a touch of Sleaford Mods’ lyrical gob to depict a queasy reckoning with our interminable, imperial hangover, while ‘Meat Teeth’s acrid, pulsing sequencer piece fosters intense levels of tension that makes the sledgehammer ending ever more lethal.

The heartbeat of Benefits is the poetic vacillation between enraged denunciation and anguished rumination, often in tortured, knotted conflict within the same sentence. “Weeks later there’s roadside flowers, and your gut takes a hit, until a fucking little shit cuts you up at the roundabout, makes you late for work by a little bit” spits Chapman on ‘Empire’, a characteristic lyrical barb which illustrates his impulse to find humanity in the targets of his invective. His spoken-word delivery can seize you with terrifying accuracy. Final track ‘Council Rust’ is a conclusive gasp for community and meaning, speaking of abandoned parks, drunken ghosts and “weather beaten lack of trust” in a mournful haze of socially fractured and atomised lament that ponders the album’s thesis: what kind of world are we heading to?

Bank of England Governor Andrew Baily, who earns over 18 times the average salary, quipped last year that workers shouldn’t ask for a pay rise. As the state prepares to indulge in the grotesque spectacle of hierarchy and class discipline, the shrinking political possibilities and belief that things can change dwindle day by day, as is the point. Nails is an essential lifeboat in the grey sea of political corruption and socio-economic paralysis, a piercingly potent and moving noise-punk admonishment of our ebbing solidarity that vigorously validates your anger and tells you that yes, this is wrong, it’s right for you to care, and there’s a better world to be had.