Old men yelling at clods—in terms of popular music, that’s what Sleaford Mods are. Jason Williamson, fifty, and Andrew Fearn, forty-nine, are two Englishmen from Nottingham at the top of their game, which implicates the game itself. If popular music has mostly fought its battles online for the last two decades, it’s done nothing but for ten months. That’s where Sleaford Mods live, singing about tweets and log-in names and bloggers. The band shows up in the same online publications as, say, Phoebe Bridgers and Playboi Carti, and their new album, Spare Ribs, is the number-four album in the UK this week. Spare Ribs is the best rock album I’ve heard in ages, even if I’m hard pressed to tell you what rock is now. Iggy Pop, though, who knows at an atomic level what rock is, said they are “undoubtedly, absolutely, definitely the world’s greatest Rock and Roll band.” Adjusting for friendship and Iggy’s benevolence, that’s still a dispositive piece of information. I will hedge slightly and say that Sleaford Mods make physical poetry in an omnidirectional masculine style. There aren’t that many compelling men in pop now, and few with any libidinal oomph, other than Harry Styles.
