The members of Shopping would be ideal candidates for fitness instructors. On their three albums to date, the U.K. disco-punk trio have proven themselves more than qualified for the job: Their music is all sweat and swagger, a breathless regimen of pulse-pounding rhythm and hectoring directives that both berate you into thinking you’re not doing enough while inspiring you to do better. And after subtly upgrading their scrappy sound on 2018’s The Official Body—and graduating from the DIY circuit to international festival stages—Shopping are more vigorously shaking up their program. But while the group’s fourth album, All of Nothing, bears all the surface sparkle and smooth contours of a brand new elliptical apparatus, the workout is every bit as demanding as before.
Shopping have reached the same crossroads many of their post-punk forbears hit around the mid-’80s—i.e., the choice between wrapping their polemical discourse in more pop-friendly packaging to win over the masses, or resigning themselves to a life on the fringes spent preaching to the choir. All or Nothing attempts to have it both ways, amplifying and revelling in the perennial tension between escapist pleasure and anti-capitalist critique at the core of so much classic post-punk. The new record leans more heavily on synthesizers and drum pads than any previous Shopping album, but stops just shy of redefining them as a synth-pop band. After all, this group has always functioned as a pure musical democracy, its constituent parts—Andrew Milk’s piston-like drumming, Billy Easter’s deep, juddering bass, Rachel Aggs’ wonderfully squiggly guitar—locking together like a jigsaw puzzle, with no single component overwhelming the others. But the added textures invest the group’s invectives with heightened drama. When Aggs demands, “Why don’t you show some initiative?” on the prickly “Initiative,” she seems to implicate herself—so the group puts her words into action and redirects the song skyward on a synth-powered motorik thrust.
A big reason why Shopping adapt so easily to their new surroundings is that they’ve never been an angry, confrontational sort of post-punk band. For all their wiry energy and staccato sloganeering, Shopping have always embraced pop melody and absurdist humor, and All or Nothing’s more polished production pushes those qualities to the fore: On “Follow Me,” Aggs combats surveillance culture by cheekily seducing a CCTV camera (“Follow me/I’ll make it worth it!”), while the consumerist blues of “For Your Pleasure” imagines an alternate ’80s where the B-52’s steered clear of the Love Shack. But even in the absence of electronic embellishments, Shopping remain a marvel of human technology: Layering no fewer than three different competing chorus lines atop its hand-clapped punk-funk beat, “Expert Advice” is both an emblem of information-overload culture and a model of spartan efficiency. And on the equally lean and propulsive “Body Clock,” the band approach peak intensity while addressing the sheer exhaustion of staying alive in 2020: “I need something to calm my nerves,” Aggs sings, “I’ve just got to keep up the pace.” It’s the sort of admission that suggests the onset of a panic attack, or a full-on nervous breakdown. But as the song’s incessant rhythm affirms, relief is just a dancefloor away.
Buy: Rough Trade
