STANDOUT NEW ALBUM

The Demise Of Planet X

Sleaford Mods

Following a change to their creative relationship, this is not only Sleaford Mods’ most ambitious album to date, it is their best.

9.3

by David Rea

10 January 2026

Release date: 16 January 2026

Label: Rough Trade

HOW MIGHT A BAND MANAGER pitch Sleaford Mods to record executives today? Two working-class men in their 50s, who make minimalist, abrasive, foul-mouthed post-punk. On stage the frontman barks sweary lyrics, with one hand on his hip like a Regency-era dandy, and the other dad dances in the background wearing shorts, a grey beard and baseball cap. Oh, and they shoot their music videos in deserted car parks and rundown backstreets. Queue bewildered stares and tears of frustration.

And yet Sleaford Mods last two studio albums, Spare Ribs (2021) and UK Grim (2023), have both reached the top 5 of the UK Albums Chart. Yard Act, Viagra Boys and Big Special might plough adjacent post-punk fields, but none have the same direct, unvarnished attack, or leave the same trace elements of menace and anger in the air. Williamson gives such intense performances you worry he may burst into flames, or punch a cameraman for being a middle-class twat. And he delivers lyrics with the implacable force of someone who knows he's speaking the truth and it matters. Sleaford Mods are quite simply the most viscerally engaging working-class voice in UK music today. And their 13th studio album The Demise of Planet X, out on the 16th of January, is their best yet.

It is also their most ambitious. But before we get to that, fans can rest assured Sleaford Mods’ trademark components are still in place. There are plenty of those addictive little hooks Jason Williamson writes with apparent ease; he still rants like a Rottweiler, or someone who’s taken too much amphetamine in order to get through a raging hangover; and he still scatterguns ‘fucking’ and ‘cunt’ all over his lyrics.

‘The Good Life’ leads off with a characteristically urgent bass line, the song's claustrophobic paranoia delivered with a demonic hook. (Gwendoline Christie almost steals the show with a ferocious, double-tracked guest vocal.) The paired-back, mechanical post-punk of ‘Gina Was’ and ‘Flood the Zone’ could have found a home on the Mods’ last studio album UK Grim. And ‘Double Diamond’ is backed by an irresistible earworm of a baseline, which lazily lopes along, over which Williamson spins a grimy urban tale of an early morning hangover.

“Intrigued by their zeitgeist-y lyrics, journalists often try to box Sleaford Mods into a political position, asking them for their views on everything from the British Labour Party to Gaza. But Williamson’s words don't add up to State of the Nation Addresses.”

But there is also a new level of sonic detail here. Even after multiple listens through on headphones, I was still hearing new crackling textures and melodic beeps half-buried in the mix. The additional strata have grown out of a shift in Williamson and Andrew Fearn’s creative relationship. With an assistant engineer on board, Fearn was free to focus more on production. The adjustment has paid off with change to spare. ‘Bad Santa’ sets out a soundscape fraught with drama and doom, reminiscent of Portishead’s ‘Sour Times’, and the melancholy loop which comes in later recalls Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’. Closer ‘The Unwrap’ showcases another layered backdrop, a tunefully spooky balm to Williamson’s sandpaper voice.

Intrigued by their zeitgeist-y lyrics, journalists often try to box Sleaford Mods into a political position, asking them for their views on everything from the British Labour Party to Gaza. But Williamson’s words don't add up to State of the Nation Addresses; they are, as he put it in a recent interview with State of Sound, simply an articulation of his ‘surroundings and circumstances’; they are also highly individualised visions, built around sharply drawn images. On this new release he describes a world where we count the amount of protein in a Sausage & Egg McMuffin but don't notice the brokenhearted, where people are miserably off their faces walking around budget supermarkets.

The duo have said the new release is about an impending apocalypse, which will come not in a ‘Mad Max-style, bacchanalian blowout’, but through ‘social ennui, cultural entropy and selfish corruption’. Throughout the album, this unifying theme is fractured by Williamson’s emotionally raw streams of consciousness, filled with mental torment. Just take this from ‘The Good Life’: ‘I smack my head / In a smelly bed / And I cry like a fuckin’ child / My fuckin’ heads gone’. Such admissions of anguish and vulnerability are of a piece with a planet gone wrong, where everybody has been emotionally numbed by doom-scrolling and consumerism.

Sleaford Mods fill a hole in our cultural landscape, detailing a world barely glimpsed in the mainstream media or on TV streaming services. And they do it in a way which is adrenaline-charged, full of invention and utterly thrilling. With this new release, their unique voice has grown richer, and will, we hope, resound in new spaces and reach many more ears.