As follow-ups to chart-topping albums go, Ugly begins in pretty uncompromising style. True, opener Yum commences with lyrics that lean towards the kind of positive personal affirmations that now proliferate in pop, lines you could imagine being belted out over a big power-ballad chorus: “You are great, you are good, you’re a king, you’re a queen, you’re a genius.” But their message of self-love is undercut by the rest of the track: an unsettling synth tone that becomes more percussive and relentless, the sound of someone breathing in the gasping, heaving manner of a panic attack. The electronics intensify, then resolve into something resembling a house pulse, punctuated by voices screaming and whimpering, and more panic-attack breathing. The lyrics keep shifting, throwing out descriptions of a futile visit to a therapist, howled litanies of mindless hedonism, the saga of Slowthai’s misadventures with Viagra – “I took a blue pill and I lost composure”, apparently – and lines that might sound celebratory if they weren’t being shouted in a distressed yelp: “Smoking weed, singing Lauryn Hill, any bad vibes and they’re gonna get killed.” Then it collapses entirely, consumed by bursts of jarring, arrhythmic noise. End of track one.
It’s perhaps also worth noting that Slowthai – Tyron Frampton to his mum – has chosen to celebrate the release of Ugly by getting its title tattooed on his face. Whatever you think about that as a long-term life choice, it does suggest an artist in obdurate mood. But why wouldn’t Slowthai be feeling bullish? He’s thrived despite various controversies; his last album, 2021’s Tyron, went to No 1 in the UK and – judging by the video for current single Feel Good at least – he has a fanbase that cuts across genre borders: the Slowthai devotees it shows range from snapback-sporting rap fans to goths and emos.
Moreover, on Ugly, he’s succeeded in minting a sound that’s entirely his own: severe, noisy, occasionally punishing, it shifts away from Tyron’s darkly ascetic hip-hop to something that expands dramatically on the punky yowl of his 2018 single Doorman. He’s still capable of coming up with relatively straightforward rap tracks, as on Fuck It Puppet, but more frequently he sounds as if he’s backed by a live band: albeit one buffeted by discordant electronics, chaotic patchworks of sampled vocals and rhythms informed by dance music (Never Again’s snare-heavy pattern is an inch away from a drum’n’bass break; the beats on Feel Good are unremitting and machine-like), until the atmosphere they conjure seems closer to the twitchy claustrophobia of early 90s “darkside” rave tracks than punk or indie.
For all the chaos, it’s a sound that’s far from melody-averse – Tourniquet and Happy have great tunes; the chorus of the title track is ready for festival audiences to join in with – although the melodies are delivered via Slowthai’s gleefully untutored voice. You could argue he often sounds less like a vocalist than someone singing along to the radio after a few drinks, but in a landscape heavy with Auto-Tune, it feels human and affecting.
So do his lyrics. The swagger and macho bravado of his UK rap peers is absent, replaced with bug-eyed intensity and witty self-deprecation; his stories of life on society’s margins are big on desperate scuffling, horror and disgust; his depictions of mental health crises go some way beyond the standard pop topics of anxiety and self-esteem: the subject of hearing voices crops up on Fuck It Puppet and Happy. He’s good at switching from a metaphor into something more earthy – “When the vultures perch with a piecing grin / And your boss won’t fuck off” – and good, too, at puncturing pop’s obsession with self-help platitudes. Selfish opens with him advising listeners to “practice gratitude” and be thankful for the lives they lead before going dramatically off-message: “Bloody hell, it all turns to shit.”
The pat summary would be to call Ugly Slowthai’s alt-rock album. You can see why people could get that idea – Happy’s string-bending distorted guitar and the screamed vocals at the end of Falling both recall the Pixies; Sooner opens with a breezy rhythm not unlike that of the Strokes’ Last Night – but that feels reductive. Take the title track, with its glowering clouds of synthesiser and woozy guitars, its gradual ratcheting of tension as Slowthai switches from singing to rapping, its singalong chorus bolstered by voices not really singing along as shrieking and bellowing: what alt-rock band sounds like this? And indeed, would indie music not currently be in better shape if it sounded this odd, visceral, cathartic and appealing? Better to say that Ugly is an album that carves out its own space: messy but vital, it deserves to be huge.
This week Alexis listened to
JIM – Still River Flow
Member of longstanding house collective Crazy P moonlights as singer-songwriter: the results are a little yacht rock-y, a little Balearic, entirely delightful.
• This article was amended on 2 March 2022 to correct an error in lyrics supplied by the record label.
