The fourth album from Soft Play – Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent’s punk duo, formerly known as Slaves – concludes with one of the most extraordinary tracks of the year. Over a tinny mandolin riff and doleful violin, Holman employs his most abrasive hardcore rasp to lay bare a mind bludgeoned by grief. Everything and Nothing’s juxtaposition of sweetly jangling instrumental with strained, sandpaper vocals is spine-tingling enough, but the lyrics make it a masterpiece. Name-checking a late friend – while also seemingly alluding to Vincent’s partner, who died of cancer in 2020 – the pair tangle mundanity with utter desolation (“white knuckles on the counter in the kitchen”) to create a singularly beautiful and arresting portrait of loss.
Amazingly, Heavy Jelly also features one of the funniest songs in recent memory. Punk’s Dead, the Kent outfit’s ingeniously arch retort to complaints about their name change – a decision they arrived at after accepting Slaves’ problematic baggage – quotes from internet whingers. “Come and get a load of these PC babies,” shrieks Holman, churning satire into catharsis, before delivering a comically sublime line about Johnny Rotten.
Holman is a reliably witty and unexpected lyricist, mining absurd pain from ordinary minutiae – there are songs about leaking bin bags, gym guys (“Mike Tyson meets Rylan”) and a worm marooned on asphalt. The sonic creativity of Everything and Nothing is not always apparent elsewhere on an album full of very harsh, relatively atonal punk-metal – a mode that can get monotonous. Still, the highlights of Heavy Jelly are enormous; despite the despair, Soft Play’s future has never looked brighter.
