Swansea Sound - Pre-Post-Truth Swansea Sound

‘Pre-post-truth’ sees Swansea Sound expand their musical ambition and broaden their lyrical targets. This album is loud and it’s outspoken, but it’s also energetic, emotional and very witty. There’s an awareness of impotence too: the songs are often self-mocking, asking if it’s even possible to make subversive statements in a world where the communication channels are all owned by the tech-bros themselves.

In The Grease That Oils the Wheels, a runaway train of a song, Amelia and Hue sing three duets: in the first part, they’re a young couple struggling to make ends meet in a gig economy dominated by Uber and Deliveroo; in the second they are in a middle class band, arguing how much money they should spend on online influencers to achieve digital fame, and in the third they are a wealthy political couple (think Nick Clegg and his wife) who’ve traded in their political influence to secure lucrative jobs advising big-tech companies. The one thing all three pairs have in common is that they are totally expendable: they are merely the grease that oils the wheels.

There are love songs here too. Wrong Way Round, sweet, warm and catchy in a Squeeze kind of a way, is a fond tribute to a loved one who can gently nudge you out of depression. Double de-clutch is an ode to the Dylan Thomas book-bus, sometimes seen at music festivals in Wales. Its owner, Jeff Towns, realised it was hard to get people to come and buy poetry books from his shop, so converted an old bus into a mobile store and took the books to the people instead: a temporary, mobile, analogue idyll. Dylan Thomas himself is echoed in the lyrics, linking the song back to a truly bygone time, an imagined pre-post-truth era, where maybe we saw things more clearly.