Gang Of Four: What Happens Next

Stinging return of new-look post-punk legends.

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

The departure of singer Jon King, who quit after 2011’s Content, could easily have been a fatal blow to the on-off career of Gang Of Four. But fellow songwriter and founder member Andy Gill has pressed on regardless, the guitarist enlisting a ruck of hired help that includes The Kills’ Alison Mosshart, Bowie bassist Gail Ann Dorsey and Japanese guitar lord Hotei.

It’s to Gill’s credit that the band have retained their venom, spitting out terse rhythms and thick squirts of electronica. And while the line-up may be slightly less familiar, his lyrical concerns remain in place: national and cultural identity, global citizenship, how to survive a growing tide of info-technology.

Neither Where The Nightingale Sings nor England’s In My Bones offer a particularly flattering view of Gill’s homeland, while the pounding industrial rock of Dead Souls suggests that apathy is the real enemy. What happens next? This, that’s what./o:p

Rob Hughes

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2008, and sister title Prog since its inception in 2009. Regular contributor to Uncut magazine for over 20 years. Other clients include Word magazine, Record Collector, The Guardian, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and When Saturday Comes. Alongside Marc Riley, co-presenter of long-running A-Z Of David Bowie podcast. Also appears twice a week on Riley’s BBC6 radio show, rifling through old copies of the NME and Melody Maker in the Parallel Universe slot. Designed Aston Villa’s kit during a previous life as a sportswear designer. Geezer Butler told him he loved the all-black away strip.