Written by: Tom Wilson | Sunday 31st March 2024

“The worst days of our lives will provide great entertainment.”

Like Australia’s REGURGITATOR, you have absolutely no idea what you’re in for when you press play on a new BOB VYLAN record. Their follow-up to 2022’s MOBO-winning Bob Vylan Presents the Price of Life opens with Humble as the Sun, a disarmingly easy-going organ-and-drums jam that sees Bobby dropping optimistic bars about BOB VYLAN’s rise to where they are now. The reggae flavour, coupled with the smiling cover art, makes for a surprising first impression. Have the group that once sang Lynch Your Leaders finally chilled out?

Like hell they have.

As multi-faceted as the band themselves, Reign is up-tempo rap over a PRODIGY-style break before taking a sharp left turn and plunging into a slow, pissed-off drill diatribe with the words “fuck queen and country.” The production might be getting cleaner with each album, but the rage remains, seething out of every note and every bar. GYAG (Get Yourself a Gun) is another brutal takedown of wealth inequality in “Great” Britain, with a slamming chorus reminiscent of G.D.P. and one of my favourite lines on the album – “Neighbours on my block witness me get it crackin’ / Wasn’t talking ‘bout my looks when they said that I was strappin’.”

He enlists his daughter, nieces and nephews to shout the chorus of Dream Big, a high-octane message to his younger self backed by a pounding drum performance from Bobbie. Hunger Games pairs a hard-as-nails guitar riff with a Matthew McConaughey-style “Alright Alright” for another dark trip through the world of the have-nots, before the headbanging shifts into soothing electronica and tribal drums, as Bobby delivers a series of affirmations that he needs to hear as much as we do. “You are stronger than you think you are. You are loved, you are not alone,” he tells us. “You are going through hell but keep going.” It would sound corny if he wasn’t so goddamn sincere. Right Here takes the familiar Angela Bassett sample made famous by FATBOY SLIM and turns it into a slamming nu metal banger, replete with a choice brag (“Independent with a MOBO, bitch!”) and a sick beat. With a title like Makes Me Violent, you’d expect more fury, but instead we get a chilled-out singalong with a grunge-y guitar and more percussive wizardry from Bobbie. He’s A Man could easily have been titled “Portrait of a Dickhead”, and is an absolutely furious takedown of the kind of racist, obnoxious boofhead you see kicking up a stink outside of a club at 2am and threatening to sue the bouncer. Ring The Alarm melds drill with another badass riff before tossing in some reggae flavour, and they bring things to a storming close with I’m Still Here. When Bobby screams “You’ll never take me alive,” you believe it.

Dynamic, polished and bristling with anger, Humble as the Sun is a brutal but empowering snapshot of life as an underdog in working class Britain. It’s only April, and this is already a contender for album of the year. It is damn near flawless. BOB VYLAN have once again proved themselves as the gold standard for urgent rage.

Humble as the Sun comes out April 5th. Pre-order here.