13th Floor New Song Of The Day: Sleaford Mods – Mork n Mindy ft Billy Nomates

With a new album on the way, here are Sleaford Mods with a new song, Mork n Mindy and a guest appearance by Billy Nomates.

Here at the 13th Floor we love it when friends play nicely with each other. Back in April we spoke to Jason of The Sleafords and then we discovered and talked to Billy Nomates.

With the US election up in the air, Jason’s sneering vocal over an hypnotic beat sounds strangly soothing. And Billy is the icing on the cake! Here is ye olde record company blurb:

Poised to blow the cobwebs off life and unleash some much-needed wit and charm upon us, Sleaford Mods today announce the release of their astonishing sixth studio album, entitled ‘Spare Ribs’, out via Rough Trade on January 15 2021.

New single, ‘Mork n Mindy’ featuring Billy Nomates is out today. The official video, which was directed by Ben Wheatley (whose latest body of work, Rebecca, is currently showing on Netflix and features a prominent cameo from frontman Jason Williamson) was filmed on location in Nottingham and in a replica of the house that Jason grew up. The band performed the track on Seth Meyers in the US yesterday evening and the host Seth played the single, recorded from the band’s 100 Club show in London earlier in September.

Jason says on the new track, “Mork n Mindy is the sound of the central heating and the dying smells of Sunday dinner in a house on an estate in 1982. Concrete, dinted garages, nicotine. Where beauty mainly exists in small cracks on the shell of your imagination. Captured perfectly in Ben Wheatley’s video for the song.”

The polemical Jason Williamson and dexterous producer Andrew Fearn kick against the pricks with unrivalled bite, railing against hypocrisy, inequality and apathy with their inimitable, scabrous sense of humour.  And Spare Ribs, their astonishing sixth album, featuring Amy Taylor of Melbourne punks Amyl and the Sniffers and the British newcomer Billy Nomates, finds the duo charged with ire at the UK Government’s sense of entitlement, epitomized by its devil-may-care approach to the coronavirus crisis.

Recorded in lockdown in a furious three-week studio blitz at JT Soar in July; the album kicks off with their first-ever ‘intro’ track, the experimental ‘A New Brick’, which sees Jason adopt the persona of, as he describes it, a “circus master”, acknowledging with ironic jolliness, “We’re all so Tory tired / And beaten by minds small.” There is, he insists, no reason to feign optimism about 10 years of the Tories: “The only way you can wage war against them by explaining it in an intelligent manner, and not feeling intimidated at coming across as being negative.”

Commenting on the new album Jason says, “’Our lives are expendable under most governments, secondary under a system of monetary rule. We are stock if you like, parts on a shelf for the purposes of profit, discarded at any moment if fabricated or non-fabricated crisis threatens productivity. This is constant, obviously and notably in the current pandemic. The masses cannot be present in the minds of ill-fitting leaders, surely? Or else the realisation of their catastrophic management would cripple their minds. Much like the human body can still survive without a full set of ribs we are all ‘spare ribs’, preservation for capitalism, through ignorance and remote rule, available for parts.”

Spare Ribs is the sound of a band so sure of their own sonic terrain that they can now explore its outer regions. The album’s title, Jason says, emerged from “the idea of the amount of people that died from the first wave of coronavirus; human lives are always expendable to the elites… We’re in a constant state of being spare ribs.” Yet Sleaford Mods are an essential part of Britain’s musical anatomy.

SPARE RIBS

1. The New Brick
2. Shortcummings
3. Nudge It (Features Amy Taylor Amyl and the Sniffers)
4. Elocution
5. Out There
6. Glimpses
7. Top Room
8. Mork n Mindy (Features Billy Nomates)
9. Spare Ribs
10. All Day Ticket
11. Thick Ear
12. I Don’t Rate You
13. Fishcakes