Arab Strap return with a characteristically grim-but-humorous state of the nation report after 30 years in the game.
“I’ve got a portly paunch I just can’t shift / I feel undesired, dismissed, adrift.” Welcome to the world of Arab Strap, the Glasgow duo who turn middle-aged misery into poetry.
To be fair, they’ve been doing that since they were young men, but their woebegone tales of drunken fighting and fucking – always infused with deadpan humour – have mutated into moans about late life and the state of the world today.
New single You You You finds Aidan Moffatt’s weary disappointment at the world undimmed, railing against his ageing body (“My own limbic system fights me… pruritus scroti in my crotch”) and failing mind (“I’m always bored, It seems nothing excites me… I’ve got a seething sadness in my soul”).
And yet, as so often with Moffatt and his multi-instrumentalist partner Malcolm Middleton, amid the despair and decay, there’s hope, reminding us that at heart it’s a song about (in Moffatt’s word) future felicity and fellowship: “I fear for my son, I fear for my daughter / But in this world of slaughter / I’ve got you, you, you.”
The song, set to a contrastingly euphoric Italo-disco backing, ends with consideration of the dilemma that if we are listening to this song on Spotify “then we both fund weapons-grade AI” – yet how else will we hear it?
Moffatt says the song is “an attempt to remind ourselves, and hopefully others, that the world’s not full of awful people. That there are millions of us out there dealing with the same worries every day.
“From the rising costs of absolutely everything, our mental and physical health, the constant slaughter and tyranny in our newsfeeds, to playing an unwitting part in the military-industrial complex, and the endless warping of reality.
“It can often feel like a complete absence of human decency – it’s no wonder that despondency can feel like our default disposition.”
However, while the song digs into these troubles and tumultuous times, it does so with a purpose. “It was designed as a kind of invocation,” explains Moffat. “To bring forth the stubbornly elusive spirits of hope and solidarity.”
You, You, You comes out almost three decades to the day since the release of their first single, and two years after their eighth album, whose title sums up their philosophy perfectly: I’m Totally Fine With It Don’t Give A Fuck Any More.