Great punk rock is meant to offend: it’s not meant to be an easy-listening experience. When the first snot-nosed kids from England crammed safety pins through their ears and tore holes in their knock-off jeans, they took that same fuck it all attitude towards music. If you had a drum kit, a bass, and a guitar and somewhere to turn it up, you could be a band, regardless of whether or not you could actually play the instruments. And wildly creative music came out of this artistic abandonment. In the case of SOFT PLAY, Isaac Holman and Laurie Vincent carry on this legacy with their nihilistic, noisy punk album HEAVY JELLY, a self-deprecating collection of eleven hook-heavy paeans to spilled trash cans, earthworms, gym junkies, and John Wick.
Speaking of meaning to offend, in today’s world, calling your band Slaves is pretty high up on the list, which is what Holman and Vincent used as their first designation for their noise-making partnership back when they started in 2012. It’s a testament to their empathy acumen that by 2022, they realized the negative connotations that come along with such a trauma-laden term, and were able to change the name to…SOFT PLAY. The use of ellipses in this case is very, very deliberate because while the guys were praised for changing the name, they got a fair amount of grief for changing it to something so…underwhelming. But the music of SOFT PLAY exists in this three-dot space: while what you hear on the surface may say one thing, when you dig deep, you find there’s a lot more to it than just a couple of guys screaming from the point of view of an annelid.
The band has a knack for teetering on the edge of ridiculousness, but under that creative absurdity lies a very visceral dissection of society as a whole. None of this is more evident than on their lead single “Punk’s Dead,” which addresses the how and why of the name change. While the band errs on the side of brevity on most of these tracks, they say a lot in those few minutes. The chorus for “Punk’s Dead” is a concise, tongue-in-cheek analysis of the genre. ‘I don’t like change!,’ whines Isaac Holman. ‘Punk’s dead, pushing up daisies- come and get a load of these P.C. babies!‘ It’s a far cry from ’80s punk rock and hardcore adjacent music, which was loaded with misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobic rants. And, quite frankly, that’s a good thing.
The humor is thick and razor sharp throughout. It’s hard not to listen to the album and hear the acerbic social analysis of the Beastie Boys in there and, indeed, the duo’s second album Take Control was produced by none other than Mike D. HEAVY JELLY is an album that’s a not so holy mash up of abrasive, hard-hitting punk rock and snarling vocals delivered in a syncopated hip-hop manner. One of the best lines from the album comes from “Punk’s Dead” as well: ‘Johnny Rotten is turning in his bed. I was gonna say grave, but the fucker ain’t dead.’ How long would a Johnny Rotten last in 2024, anyway? After all, music has come a long way since the Sex Pistols were screaming fuck this and fuck that.
That’s not to say HEAVY JELLY isn’t loaded with that nihilistic attitude. “Mirror Muscles” throws the entire CrossFit, steroidal, gym junkie community under the tires of the punk rock bus, deltoids flattened and pectoral muscles shredded behind the middle fingers of some pint-swilling vagabonds with neck tattoos, tank tops, and mullets. “Bin Juice Disaster” narrows the focus, a ‘30-liter bin was filled more than it should have been,’ a metaphor for the road of good intentions. Littered with cinematic references, the band compares their existence to Jurassic Park, Armageddon, 2012, and I Am Legend, among others, within those tight two minutes. It’s not unusual to try and magnify the redundancy of our lives through the lenses of a Hollywood camera, and SOFT PLAY have a knack for acknowledging this fault in our human existence. It’s hard for any of us to just sit and be comfortable with ourselves, particularly when we’ve just spent two hours of our lives watching Keanu Reeves wreak havoc on society for shooting his dog. (Don’t worry. SOFT PLAY has a song about that, as well.)
As a punk rock album drenched in humor, HEAVY JELLY would be easy to dismiss. And with the album sitting in the top ten in the UK, alongside Eminem, Olivia Rodrigo and Glass Animals it might be even easier to toss them aside as punk rock sell-outs, as the rock and roll gatekeepers are apt to do. But the reason for the album’s success runs much deeper than that. SOFT PLAY write songs that everyone of us can identify with: while a fifty-something Eminem gripes about a changing PC world, Olivia sings songs riddled with the amplified angst and anxiety of teenage girls, and Glass Animals do whatever the hell they do, SOFT PLAY is singing about the trash over-flowing and living a champagne lifestyle on lemonade money. It’s an album loaded with self-deprecation and, in that sense, it makes it that much more compelling. These boys are dropping truth-bombs, in other words, and all of England is there for it, if not the rest of the Western World.
None of this is more apparent than on the last song of the album, “Everything and Nothing” an absolutely stunning tribute to the heavy weight of grief. The song is centered around acoustic guitars, mandolin, and violins, conjuring up images of “Losing My Religion”-era REM. After twenty five minutes of abrasive guitars and pounding drums and pummeling punk rock it’s a descent back to reality, and what a descent it is. Vincent and Holman are no strangers to grief, the latter having lost his wife to cancer, leaving behind two young children, and both having lost their dear friend Bailey Churchill around that same time. The lyrics, from start to finish, are a precision shot to the gut, a truly evocative encapsulation of what it’s like to move through life having lost people so dear to you that it feels as if a part of you has been ripped apart:
‘White knuckles on the counter in the kitchen.They don’t know hard I’m kickingTo keep my head above.Setting sun and a starling murmuration:Amongst the devastation,I feel love.‘
