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Dec 02, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Alasdair McLellan Sleaford Mods

English electronic punk duo, Sleaford Mods (Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn) are releasing a new album, Spare Ribs, on January 15, 2021 via Rough Trade. Now they have shared another song from it, “Shortcummings,” via a video for it. Its title references Dominic Cummings, the former Chief Advisor to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Cummings led the 2016 referendum campaign for Britain to leave the EU, but got into trouble this year when he broke COVID-19 lockdown rules. Watch the Ian Tatham-directed video below.

Frontman Jason Williamson had this to say about the song in a press release: “I wrote the lyrics to ‘Shortcummings’ in late 2019 after becoming annoyed by Dominic Cummings’ increased unelected presence. The arrogance of the privileged generally leads to short, short short, short, short cummings in a momentary centre stage at the cost of untold human misery and exploitation of public money. In the case of Cummings, he knows exactly what he lost when he walked out of No.10’s front door. It looked staged, or given what I suspect is his sense of intellectual superiority, perhaps one last show of bizarre defiance. But there is no defiance when you come from privileged stock, just pistols at dawn. Posh hamsters going at each other. It’s just so fucking tiresome, as we lumpily coexist, us and the elite. The fortress of control is too strong and indeed there is no denying now, that there is powerlessness in the idea of revolt in this modern day daylight robbery.”

Previously Sleadord Mods shared Spare Ribs’ first single, “Mork N Mindy,” via a video for it. The song and video featured Billy Nomates. They also performed the song on Late Night with Seth Meyers. “Mork N Mindy” was one of our Songs of the Week. The album also features Amy Taylor of Australian punks Amyl and The Sniffers.

Spare Ribs’ title was inspired by the pandemic, as Williamson explained in a previous press release: “the idea of the amount of people that died from the first wave of coronavirus; human lives are always expendable to the elites… We’re in a constant state of being spare ribs.”

Back in May the band released a career-spanning retrospective, All That Glue. Before that, their last album was 2019’s Eton Alive.

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