Gurriers - Nobody’s Coming To Save You Review
On their second album, Gurriers turn political anger and personal frustrations into songs built for sweaty, cathartic crowds.
There are a fair number of people in the world who believe politics should be kept out of music, that there should be a clear line so as not to suck the enjoyment from it, as if the two things haven’t always been interlinked. Gurriers’ sophomore album Nobody’s Coming To Save You takes its main principle from a quote by the AIDS activist Dan Savage: ‘We bury our friends in the morning, we protest in the afternoon, and we dance all night.’ They’re a group that understand that there’s no better time than right now to be overtly political.
Where the anger of their debut quietly grew into something bigger by its end, here it’s biting at you from the get-go. In a time when it’s easier than ever to effectively tune into the mass killing of thousands of people worldwide from our phones, Dan Hoff uses his writing as an opportunity to stir something within the listener. Across the album, he cleverly weaves in various literary references from activists and writers alike. Thematically, he moves between the political and the personal, exploring how the two can cross paths. ‘Nobody’s Coming To Save You’ is a deeply affecting call to arms on which he utilises words from activist Rebecca Solnit and author Kurt Vonnegut to remind us that resistance begins on an individual level and nothing changes if nothing changes. ‘Party Lines’ is perhaps the album’s most brutal yet necessary listen. Written as the war in Sudan escalated, it focuses on the hypocrisy of governments that provide aid whilst supplying arms to fuel conflict in the same place.
Elsewhere on the album, Hoff turns the lens on himself and those around him. ‘Waiting For Fisher’ captures the frustrations of his peers over the workday slog, while the reality of life as a touring musician, and the feeling of being distant from everyone important to him, really sets in on ‘I Wish I Was’.
In the two years since they released their debut album, Gurriers have gone from playing tiny venues to support slots in stadiums and featuring on the bills of some of the world’s most well-known festivals, so it’s only right that their sound has grown along with the band itself. To reach this next level, they enlisted the help of Idles’ Mark Bowen and Loren Humphrey to produce, and there couldn’t have been two people better suited for the job. Drawing inspiration from grunge, the band have made songs that sound ten times bigger and better than those on their debut. There are still those same jagged, driving guitar melodies on the likes of ‘Drones’, building and crashing into a drop so good you can picture the sea of sweaty limbs already. ‘Shades’ makes it easy to see why they’ve earned themselves the label of a hardcore group. It’s a chance for total catharsis: these huge instrumental arrangements give every word the space to be really, truly felt exactly as intended. There’s a strange danceability in the melancholy of it all, similar to the kind that existed within the works of Joy Division.
Nobody’s Coming To Save You finds Gurriers at the top of their game, while reminding us that all hope is not lost, even in the bleakness of modern times.