I’m trying to tell my friends about Bob Vylan.
It’s late. The club has ended and I’ve been in the DJ booth all night, so I’m both exhausted and loquacious. We’re talking music and the conversation jumps from Fontaines D.C. to Kneecap to Bob Vylan with a hundred different asides. My mind is a jumbled reflection of my Instagram feed, which is how the English duo came up in conversation. My friends don’t know too much about Bob Vylan, but they’ve been high on my timeline for months, so I get into the whole story about the Glastonbury incident and how they don’t have a tour visa for the U.S. now. It’s all documented in this story from The Guardian, but the details sound particularly absurd when you’re recounting them aloud. Then again, just about everything in the news sounds more absurd out loud these days.
Like I said, my mind had temporarily turned into my Instagram feed, so the conversation went in too many different directions before I could get to the point that Bob Vylan has a new single out, called “Sick Sad World.” The cover art is very Daria, which is fitting because Sick Sad World was the fictional TV show that Daria and Jane watched. I applaud this super ‘90s MTV reference. It’s a more straightforward rock song for Bob Vylan and, while it’s a jam, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get it into a club set soon. Definitely, I’ll hang onto it for bar gigs, or club nights where punk is part of the mix. That’s where I’ve been playing songs from the band’s last album, Humble As the Sun, so far. Dance nights have been trickier because I haven’t figured out a good way to work in their songs so that the flow isn’t too jarring. It’s the same thing with bands like Amyl and the Sniffers and Lambrini Girls. DJing is a working with a massive jigsaw puzzle and sometimes it takes longer to figure out how songs fit together.
But, back to Bob Vylan. The other thing I didn’t mention is that they’re one of the realest bands around right now and I think that their kind of realness gets lost in algorithms that prioritize taking things out of context to feign outrage. Something that I noticed when multiple controversies involving Bob Vylan unfolded on my timelines is that nearly all of the people commenting, both on socials and in legit news outlets, had clearly never listened to their music.
Bob Vylan is punk, but also draws from myriad influences. Listen to them long enough and you’ll traces of rock and grime and dancehall. Lyrically, they’re very political. Bob Vylan songs typically dig into topics like racism, colonialism and classism, all with an eye towards how this impacts regular people. So, musically, they aren’t strictly punk, but in terms of themes and attitude and DIY spirit, Bob Vylan is punk in the most Crass sense of the word.
I hadn’t heard Bob Vylan prior to news of this year’s Glastonbury festival, but I went and listened to the band and liked them enough to buy Humble As the Sun and have spent much of the summer listening to that album. It’s fantastic. The Bobs, as the pseudonymous Bobby Vylan (singer, guitar) and Bobbie Vylan (drums), are known do a wonderful job of seamlessly blending genres without sounding like a retread of Y2K alt rock.
What stands out about Bob Vylan, though, are their lyrics, which are smart, poetic and deftly mix the dire consequences of late stage capitalism under which we live with hope for a better world. It’s a tricky thing to master, definitely harder than figuring out how to work a Bob Vylan song into a dance club set, but they’ve done this repeatedly. You’ll hear the juxtaposition throughout Humble As the Sun from the title track to the single “Dream Big” to “Hunger Games.”
One of my favorite songs on Humble As the Sun, which came out last year, is “Hunger Games.” It plays off the dystopian novels/movies referenced in the title, but there’s probably also a good amount of The Running Man, Battle Royale and Squid Games in there too, as Bobby sings lines like “spin the wheel for your chance of a hot meal” and “for the love of payment/the worst days of our lives will provide entertainment.” The song’s narrative gives way to a spoken word affirmation that takes over for the last minute and change of “Hunger Games.” Bobby tells the listener, “You are more than your ability to earn/You are more than your future successors/You are here, you are now.” It’s powerful stuff.
Getting back to the new single, though. “Sick Sad World” continues Bob Vylan’s potent social commentary. Even though a lot of the song’s references are specific to the U.K., there’s plenty in it that also applies to the U.S. Listen to the first verse in particular because “Can’t afford to feed ourselves but they’re feeding us lies” is more than a little relatable under MAGA 2.0. “Sick Sad World” doesn’t have that hopeful twist that some of their previous songs have, but Bob Vylan does an excellent job of channeling so much of the rage that the regular people feel towards the ruling class into a cheeky mosh pit jam.
Ultimately, the thing that gets lost online is the thing that also gets lost when my brain starts acting like an algorithmic feed, which is to say that Bob Vylan is channeling the rage that a lot of people are feeling right now in a way that most bands aren’t. They do this very well and in a way that’s pretty accessible to listeners. So, if you’ve heard about Bob Vylan, but never actually listened to them, maybe start with “Sick Sad World,” but get Humble As the Sun into your queue too.
Get Bob Vylan’s music on Bandcamp.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs or listen to the latest Beatique Mix. Follow on Instagram or Bluesky for more updates.
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