Over the past 30 years, Mogwai have gifted us some of the greatest song titles in the history of music-naming rights. Where their post-rock peers lean toward earnest sentiment or alarmist messaging, Mogwai treat their tracklists like bathroom-stall graffiti. Whether it’s “I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead,” “Don’t Believe the Fife,” or “Stupid Prick Gets Chased by the Police and Loses His Slut Girlfriend,” their titles are less about communicating the specific mood or implicit intent of a song than providing an outlet for absurdist inside jokes. But on their 11th album, Mogwai come up with a song title that’s so on-brand, they should put it on bumper stickers and ball caps.
Appearing two tracks into The Bad Fire, “Hi Chaos” reads like Mogwai’s version of “hello Newman”: a habitual greeting to an old adversary encountered time and time again. But as the song demonstrates, the earth-quaking eruptions that previously defined the band have become less an endgame than a routine passing phenomenon. In lieu of the creeping build-ups and climactic crescendos of past Mogwai set pieces, “Hi Chaos” ambles about as if on a leisurely Sunday-afternoon stroll, and once the song’s bluesy refrain gives way to a needling downpour of guitar noise, Mogwai effectively pop open an umbrella, ensuring safe passage through the storm. While it may lack the element of surprise that powered their most totemic works, “Hi Chaos” is emblematic of Mogwai’s m.o. today: Where they once reveled in disrupting ominous quietude with explosive outbursts, these days, they’d rather redirect tense energy into uplifting expression. As such, a band that once offered apocalyptic mayhem has become a source of comforting consistency as the real world turns evermore turbulent.
For the past decade or so, Mogwai have been enjoying a new lease on life similar to the ’80s reinventions of prog-rock figureheads like Rush, Yes, and Genesis: Synths have become as integral to their sound as guitars; the songs no longer stretch past the 15-minute mark; and the band’s exploratory sensibilities are counterbalanced by a melodic finesse. In the process, Mogwai have also managed to gain new fans without alienating too many old ones: With 2021’s As the Love Continues, they became the rare veteran indie-rock band to score a U.K. No. 1 album a quarter-century into their existence.
But the band’s current cruising altitude has not been without shocks of turbulence. While The Bad Fire’s title might feel particularly relevant right now, it actually derives from an old Scottish slang term for “hell.” And that’s an apt description of multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns’ experience as recording commenced: His young daughter had just received a bone marrow transplant and chemo treatment, and her prospects of survival were uncertain. Thankfully, she pulled through, and while the album’s opening track, “God Gets You Back,” is not explicitly about that ordeal, it nonetheless stands as a testament to her perseverance. Following a tense two-minute opening flurry of arpeggiated synths, the song achieves liftoff thanks to Martin Bulloch’s driving drum pattern and Burns’ washed-out vocals, which transform an enigmatic yet evocative nine-word lyric written by Burns’ daughter (“count the roads/ Dallas eyes/ don’t breathe air”) into a personal mantra that reifies their father-daughter bond.
“God Gets You Back” is also notable for fusing three usually discrete Mogwai modes—analog synthscapes, shoegazy pop songs, and ascendent post-rock epics—into a singular consolidation of strengths. But from there, the bulk of The Bad Fire can be slotted into familiar buckets. You need only hear the stark, forlorn opening refrain of “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” to know that it will eventually build into an effects-pedal-frying onslaught—though, true to the economical nature of modern-day Mogwai, the track tops at out at seven minutes, making it a sort of pop-friendly distillation of the band’s previous behemoths. Despite its horrifyingly hilarious title, “Fanzine Made of Flesh” dutifully fills the now-mandatory quota of at least one swooning dream-pop single per Mogwai release, while the slowcore drift of “Pale Vegan Hip Pain” lures us back into the frigid, lost-in-the-forest feel of Come On Die Young.
The Bad Fire was produced by indie-crossover king John Congelton—a curveball selection for a band that tends to alternate between working with members of their Glasgow inner circle and early champion Dave Fridmann. For the most part, Congleton doesn’t push Mogwai anywhere they weren’t already heading, but in its home stretch, The Bad Fire proves this band of steely veterans can still disarm you by opening up surprising new dimensions to their sound. Featuring one of Stuart Braithwaite’s most unabashedly tender vocal performances to date, “18 Volcanoes” trades in Mogwai’s usual shoegazey overdrive for the serene, floating fuzz of My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes,” while “Lion Rumpus” suggests the gilded grandeur of their early-2000s releases delivered with the gusto of ’80s U2 (even as a brain-melting guitar solo retains the band’s spiritual connection to the Stooges). And with its Avalanches-like assemblage of jaunty piano, go-go-dancer backbeats, and psych-smeared guitar melodies, “Hammer Room” could be the most playful track in the entire Mogwai canon. The sweetly swelling closing-credits theme “Fact Boy” drives the point home: Post-rock’s preeminent pranksters have become the sort of band who can now claim they’re making happy songs for happy people and actually mean it.
