The Peaky Blinders of punk had no lead single campaign, no press rollout, no fanfare – just yolk on the face of the Monarchy and a new record in your lap. National Average kind of lands like that. Unannounced, grit-glazed, and completely unwilling to be ignored.
Coming barely a year after their breakthrough Postindustrial Hometown Blues, this record could have been a retread of off-cuts not used last Spring. Another slab of poetry-punk rage from the West Midlands. Another therapy session at the volume of a car alarm. Instead, what emerges is something stranger. The rage is still here, but it’s mutated now into taut basslines, anxious rhythms, and a sound that’s less bark, and more pressure cooker. National Average isn’t showing a band creatively distracted by a year of near constant touring either. Instead they’ve learned how to aim better, having visited probably every UK town in the last year, and heard a thousand new stories.
Opener “The Mess” sets the tone: a lurching, heavy-footed stagger into the void, all scraped knees and heart bleeding. Front man Joe Hicklin’s voice still brilliantly sits somewhere between preacher and pissed-off pub ranter, but it’s perhaps wearier now, less sermon, and more muttered confession. By the time “God Save the Pony” kicks in, the duo hit a grimy kind of stride, all funk and frustration, dragging trauma down a high street lined with boarded-up Ladbrokes and vape shops. You almost expect “Written by John Sullivan” to jauntily peel across a screen.
The songs were shaped in jam sessions and stolen studio time, in attic rooms, Devon weekends, and from fragments of leftover demos. There was seemingly no master plan by their own admission. Just the need to keep moving, to keep making. As Hicklin put it, they didn’t want to become travelling salesmen playing the same songs over and over again. Instead, National Average grew out of the blur between touring and real life, with lyrics often coming together on the spot, scribbled in the thick of it. There’s grief in “Get Back Safe”, betrayal in “Judas Song”, and a profound, gnawing discomfort with what success even means in album centrepiece “Professionals”. This isn’t working-class sloganeering though – it’s the aftermath. The awkward quiet after the shouting stops and you’re left with rent, a kid on the way, and a gob full of unsaid things.
“Shop Music” is a standout. Equal parts manifesto and middle finger, as should now be expected from the duo that includes Callum Moloney. It wrestles with the tension between art and industry, between idealism and rent day. The band themselves have have always had this battling light and dark chemistry to them on record and on stage. Hicklin sounds like a man simultaneously trying to dismantle capitalism and flog you a T-shirt. That contradiction is the point though, National Average thriving in the space where principles go to get mugged off.
Lyrically, the record is just as dense and darkly funny as their debut, but more focused now with more brutal truths. It’s this self-aware, contradictory voice, laced with gallows humour, and dryer-than-coaldust Midland wit that gives the record its power. He’s not preaching anymore. He’s processing. It’s a bewildering conversation.
Then there’s “Pig’s Puddin”, a track so deranged it could only have been born from a nervous breakdown and a fridge full of pork. It’s grotesque and oddly moving – a fever dream of the scars of scraping by dressed up as meat metaphors. Like most of the record, as well as their still-fresh debut, it shouldn’t work. And yet it absolutely does, of course.
By the time the album closes with “Thin Horses", featuring a haunting vocal from Rachel Goswell, the wreckage is complete. It’s a surprisingly tender send-off with some Nick Cave drama, which is just how they sent us off at the end of the last album too with "Dig". Not exactly hopeful, but not hopeless either. It’s a reminder that even in the depths of depression, in the worst job, the worst flat, the worst part of town, there’s still music. Still rhythm. Still an urge to scream something into a mic or dance like a twat or write a song about a lost kestrel and somehow make it mean something.
Big Special haven’t gone soft, they’ve gone surreal, and using so many conversation starters to get the balls rolling. And in doing so, they’ve made a record that’s more complex, more human, and more interesting than anyone could have expected. National Average isn’t an easy album, but it’s another necessary one. It sounds like late-stage capitalism feels after watching the new Adam Curtis series: overwhelming, exhausting, and absurd, but it's still all worth getting out of bed for.
