Primal Scream’s new album, Come Ahead, is a bit of a Trojan horse. It’s been sold on the strength of a couple of upbeat singles, and some cracking dance remixes thereof. These, Ready To Go Home and Love Insurrection, both open the record. The former’s glorious gospel choir is a call back to the Ecstasy-fuelled unity of Come Together. It’s groove, a recreation of classic `70s disco and funk. Opulently orchestrated. Highly strung. Bumped by a badass grungy punky B-line and bursts of glam stomp saxophone. The latter, built around a breakbeat, finds Bobby G singing sweetly, paying tribute to socially conscious, civil rights soul, the most scathing lyric, damning us all for our apathy. Words that could just as easily be angrily shouted.

While LP lists other upbeat numbers, the music masks a mood that’s downbeat and apocalyptic. Innocent Money picks up where Love Insurrection left off. Strutting its mirrorballed stuff, while using a homeless protagonist to reflect global financial disparity / inequality and our collective dumbing / numbing down. Deep Dark Waters is a powerful post-punk moment. Recreating the sort of garage rock that set northern soul floors spinning. Pitting the plight of refugees, displaced by war, radicalised by religion, against electric Spanish guitar. The Centre Cannot Hold predicts the collapse of a crumbling society, in which we are all complicit, over a backdrop of stridently strummed funky folk. Love Ain’t Enough “You’ve got to be tough” is a motivational mantra that bangs its head to repetitive psyche riffing and biker gang bathtub acid boogie. The percussive poem, Circus Of Life, part Last Poets, part prog-rockers Palladin’s Third World, is full of Stones-y, Jagger-esque swagger and jive. However, in a sax skronking, brass blasted second act its rap reveals an alcoholic downward spiral. A key theme throughout the album seems to be seeking solace in a bottle and running away from oneself.

Ballads such as Melancholy Man and the Phil Spector & Dion-esque Heal Yourself, are full of bitter, critical self-loathing, the record cutting between the confessional and the confrontational, redemption and revolution. Problems are highlighted, heavy topics, both political and personal, but there aren’t any solutions or much hope on offer. The album’s bleakness maybe a comment on a world in seemingly unending, escalating crises. Stuck in a system that rewards greed, grants positions of power to narcissists and sociopaths, while punishing the poor. As Bobby puts it, the planet on fire and peace still a dream. A population duped, distracted, divided, confused to the point of defeat, by multimedia misinformation and a truth of alternative facts.

False Flags feels like a sequel to Dennis Wilson’s Carry Me Home, a Beach Boys rarity decrying the US offensive in Vietnam, which The Scream covered on 1992’s Dixie-Narco. Its first person flow describing how the destruction of the working class feeds the infernal eternal war machine. The beast tempting, maiming, killing and corrupting young people with no place to go. The closing epic, 9 minute Settlers Blues is a dark damnation of colonialism, whose nightmarish narrative weaves between Elizabethan explorers, “privateers”, the Jacobean Uprising of 1745, mass starvation and Ireland’s Black `47, mentions of republican socialist James Connolly and modern day Palestine. Perhaps taking some inspiration from Neil Young’s Cortez The Killer, Andrew Innes’ axe all the while wailing in horror and homage to Eddie Hazel’s Maggot Brain.