BIG SPECIAL are announcing their highly-anticipated debut album POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES for release on 10th May via SO Recordings. The Black Country duo are also sharing their first new music of 2024, in the shape of huge new single ‘DUST OFF / START AGAIN’, along with more UK / EU headline shows and festival appearances.
The band’s first new music arrives in the wake of a sold-out winter UK headline tour, multiple playlisted singles on BBC 6 Music, and their presence as a hotly-tipped prospect for 2024 in a number of Ones To Watch lists.
‘DUST OFF / START AGAIN’ is BIG SPECIAL at their most towering and imposing. Barrages of biting spoken word, striking soulful vocals and hulking guitars coalesce around a song that catalogues the metal health impact of failed government policy on a generation with a dwindling sense of ownership and corroded autonomy. It works around the central idea that there’ll always be hope of starting again after a fall, but rallies against the very premise that life shouldn’t be a cycle of building yourself up only to be knocked down again.
Lead singer Joe Hicklin had the following to say:
DUST OFF / START AGAIN’ is a bolt of cursed vomit, spewed into a stewpot of English class issues regarding housing, ownership, mental illness, appropriation and human rights. It’s about the disregard for the common man. And how it is expected of anyone, regardless of their situation, to carry on, struggle through and go to work. It’s about how the privileged and powerful attempt to define, debate and justify the social positions of all whilst the ideals of our governing systems are pressed upon the working-class youth, so that they quietly accept their role as a commodity and place blame on each other, as they wave the flag that keeps them down.
Continuing about the album he says:
POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES is an album about depression. It’s about the different shapes it takes; personal, social, generational… and it’s about coming face to face with those ghosts and what we do or how we feel when that happens.
The album offers no answers, it is just an honest expression of a working-class experience in modern England through the eyes of ill mental health, a pursuit of art and political disenchantment; a story of rumination, realisation and reaction.
POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES is about learning that we are connected by our common struggles and though dark and rageful, the album holds a quiet sentiment of love and hope. It’s about laughing at the face of the void, recognising its oppressive weight, holding hands and moving forward.
