In August, I put out my new album The Collapse Of Everything. It’s an attempt at making a psychedelic, dark soundtrack for these dystopian times, and I’m very proud of it.

On the album are a variety of musicians and friends. I’ve been working closely in recent years with Doug Wimbish, who, since the Horace Andy albums, has been recording with me on works like the dubs I did for Panda Bear & Sonic Boom and my collaboration with Spoon. And then there’s Alex White — who plays with Fat White Family and Primal Scream — as well as Mark Bandola, who played in a band called The Lucy Show in the 80s and has an unusual understanding of the Juno keyboard and an edge to his playing style that I really like. Also, playing drums on a couple of tracks is the late great Keith LeBlanc.

When I was looking for a name, ‘the collapse of everything’ kept coming into my brain. It’s a lyric that Mark Stewart used a few years ago — a throwaway line on a song that hasn’t been released about a friend of ours in America, the anarchist writer Scott Crow. Anyway, Mark passed away in 2023, and I was obviously very saddened by his death and Keith’s as well. And it was this lyric — ‘the collapse of everything’ — that not only completely fitted with how I felt at the time, but also with how things felt and still feel in the world right now. Like there’s been a collapse, you know, a moral collapse, be it with the government, our social services, health, education, etc.

For the artwork, I asked my friend Peter Harris, who is a really good visual artist, to draw a crumpled Pinocchio puppet clutching some money. I wanted it to look a bit like the bastard love child of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Several of the track titles were inspired by the Japanese film series Battles Without Honor and Humanity (a.k.a. The Yakuza Papers) by Kinji Fukasaku. For example, one of the films is called Hiroshima Death Match (1973), so we changed it to ‘Dub Match’. But then with ‘Spaghetti Best Western’, I was trying to make a spaghetti Western track gone wrong, and when we tried coming up with a name, my engineer said ‘spaghetti Best Western’, which I thought was really funny (Best Western is the name of a cheap hotel chain in the UK).

When I’m making a song or maybe just playing with some percussion, what I like to do is pitch things down at the mixing desk. Here’s my secret: if you take some music and pitch it to 5% of its natural pitch, you start hearing really unusual things — the most odd noises. So I was taking some of these drastically pitched things, manipulating them and then getting one of my musician friends such as Skip McDonald or Alex White — both of whom are pitch perfect — to fine tune it for me as I was stretching the notes out. The whole of the album I made 13 years ago, Survival & Resistance (2012), was made this way! It was a case of hearing sequential noises in the notes and then editing and building the songs in a way that was a mad experiment, but it really worked.

If I could pick one track from the new album for you to listen to, it would be ‘Dub Inspector’. It’s almost a sort of sci-fi tribute to Lee Perry. I wanted there to be an intensity to the listening experience so that you can’t quite figure out how the track was put together — as a sort of challenge. On this particular track, I’ve played backwards, recorded backwards and mixed backwards to make it sound like things were programmed. And so trying to detect these details in the track becomes like a dub inspection. I think Lee would have loved the mischief of it.