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This can be exhausting, but Williamson has been scornful of the more energising, consensual approach of a band like Idles and on Eton Alive regularly lambasts those he considers “fakes”. You suspect that Sleaford Mods are confrontational because they feel any other response to the human condition would be regarded as an abdication of responsibility. “Graham Coxon looks like a left-wing Boris Johnson,” he snarls on the abrasive “Flipside”, a line he insists isn’t meant to be taken personally, and like many of the best insults is at once very funny and not entirely fair.

Humour is often used to put the listener at ease, but with Williamson it’s another avenue for confrontation. As ever with the Sleaford Mods, there’s a lot of humour in tracks like “Big Burt” and coke-rant “Top It Up”, but it’s the sort of humour you’re never sure whether it’s safe to laugh at in case Williamson takes offence and pops you on the nose for not taking him seriously. The lyric sees Williamson having a go at everything from “Airfix dickheads” to “namedropping ’90s pricks”, namechecking a variety of children’s TV shows and rejecting “God’s plan”. Order the latest issue of Uncut online and have it sent to your home!Īlso offering something a bit different is the aforementioned “Big Burt”, a freewheeling character piece that Fearn gave the working title “Oasisim”. Later comes “Firewall”, a little rawer but with a similar vocal sensibility, while the album closes with “Negative Script”, which has Williamson alternating between singing and his usual staccato John Cooper Clarke-style semi-spoken rap.

The band have always tangoed with grime, but here the influence is more that genre’s R&B/gospel inclinations or a scratchy version of the poppy garage of The Streets. These are pretty much unprecedented in the Mods’ canon, starting with “When You Come Up To Me”, which features an almost unrecognisable Williamson practically crooning, making a strange, stark beauty of Fearn’s beats. Where Eton Alive differs from previous albums is with the presence of a trio of what Williamson happily describes as “pop songs”. Eton Alive – the pair’s first full-length since leaving Rough Trade and forming their own label – doesn’t fiddle too much with a working formula while still sounding like the work of a band that have no plans to vacate their unexpected platform any time soon. It’s like Mike Leigh’s Meantime in musical form: bitter, funny, confusing and bleak, as Williamson and Andrew Fearn navigate the seemingly bottomless national decline with a torrent of smart rhymes, cheap synths and itchy loops. “It’s getting shitter!” spits Jason Williamson on “Big Burt”, and a sense of bilious negativity is the sustaining force of Eton Alive, Sleaford Mods’ latest studio album, cathartic in its honesty but no less depressing for that.