Never mess with Murdoch’s society
Crashing and burning oh what a pity
Tracky Nike fourth reich vitriol spray
Commonplace everyday wreck of the UK
Modern life has become one long argument with a screen, a boss, a stranger, a lover, or the idiot currently screaming beneath a flag in a supermarket car park. Shaven Primates have mined the exhaustion and alchemized it into a new EP, Kill The Algorithm. The Oxford quartet turns private dependency, political resentment, male grievance, and algorithmic manipulation into four rough-and-tumble songs powered by post-punk tension, industrial abrasion, art-rock unease, and guitars that sound ready to put somebody through a wall.
Saviour starts from the most private wound. Its language treats affection as narcotic relief, the beloved transformed into medicine for absences that began much earlier, somewhere around the missing mother, missing father, and the suspicion that another person might finally close the hole. The 1990s references make sense: Placebo’s bruised glamour, Nine Inch Nails’ compulsive machinery, A Perfect Circle’s heavy-lidded grandeur. The emotional centre remains ugly enough to feel dangerous. Love becomes dosage, fantasy becomes diagnosis, and the repeated appeal to a saviour keeps curdling into evidence that salvation has been outsourced to somebody equally mortal.
Pioneer Way drags that anxiety into public, where the nervous breakdown has flags tied to the lamp posts. The track takes aim at a Britain of workplace exhaustion, tabloid conditioning, immigrant scapegoating, screen addiction, and everyday fury looking for a body to blame. There is something grimly comic about a man screaming at an indicator while the country around him rehearses imperial fantasies beside a roundabout. The Sex Pistols influence is less about imitation than permission: permission to sneer at the pageantry, to notice how easily personal failure gets repackaged as national grievance, and to turn the resulting disgust into a hook sharp enough to draw blood.
Then Feed goes after the salesmen. These are the grievance merchants who discover lonely young men, tell them tenderness is weakness, sell coercion as confidence, and monetize every insecurity they helped aggravate. The band brings in the clenched attack of Rage Against the Machine and Metallica, but the song’s ugliest idea is economic. Misery has become a business model. The customer is kept hungry because a satisfied customer might stop clicking.
That thought detonates fully in Kill The Algorithm, where social media becomes less a tool than a delivery system for appetite, paranoia, tribal identity, and manufactured certainty. Radiohead, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden hover in the architecture, while the repeated command at the song’s centre turns disgust into something nearly ecstatic. The target is the machine that keeps learning which wound to prod next.
Listen to Kill The Algorithm below:
Shaven Primates have made four songs about dependence: on lovers, on screens, on enemies, on gurus, on systems that promise relief while feeding the sickness. The riffs grind, the drums hit with factory-floor force, and the vocals move from wounded croon to open-throated accusation. The EP is held together by the recognition that private desperation and public brutality are often roommates, splitting the rent while each insists the other started the fire.
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The post “You Prey on Those You Feed” — Oxford Quartet Shaven Primates Share “Kill The Algorithm” EP appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
