Honest Work

On the new concept album Honest Work, ten songs tell stories from the adult lives of working people in the middle and lower classes. They work night shifts in hospitals, pump breast milk in storage rooms, wonder whether they should get a prescription for Ritalin, are summoned to the boss’s office for wearing the wrong clothes, or take a day off just to walk barefoot by a lake. Lyrically, Honest Work can best be described as ‘petty-bourgeois surrealism’. It’s an album about people trying – and often failing – to navigate systems that reduce them to anonymous data points, employees, and consumers. The album is full of desperate prayers: “Doctor, I think that I’ve got a disease” (‘Focus Disease’); “Taking a day off- don’t even remember my own name” (‘Remind Me’); “I serenade on company time” (‘Lean Dreams’). In these lines, you can feel the dull ache of a generation whose emotional lives are filtered through corporate HR language and online shopping carts.