Brut Thoughts is Murkage Dave's sharpest work to date

Brut Thoughts is his sharpest work to date, a meeting point of diaristic candour and cultural witness. Loosely pop, it swerves into indie abrasion and outsider impulse, shaped by a 2024 touring stretch with Yard Act and guided by a storytelling intelligence that uses humour and reference to cut through confessional discomfort. The anger is contemporary and un-theorised: overstimulation, internet culture, extremism, grief, masculinity, empathy turning from virtue into liability. What makes the record feel uncommon is its refusal of the easiest posture available right now. Cynicism is not framed as sophistication, and irony is not allowed to do the work of insight. Dave’s wager is that you can name the rot and still insist on tenderness without converting that insistence into a brand.

That wager governs everything, from the nomadic conditions of making to the way the material formalises late-capitalist cognition. This is not a polished studio artefact so much as something assembled across borrowed rooms and borrowed hours, a practical response to the fact that most musicians cannot afford permanence. It is, as Dave puts it, "millennial meme culture music" in the most precise sense: the mind’s cacophony spilling out, it’s irony braced as armour.

The hinge is "Swordfight in a Chicken Shop". Rendered as cognitive condition, it clarifies Dave’s method: politics, culture, and selfhood spoken in one register because they are now lived without clean boundaries. He moves from imagining up a diss about Morrissey to emailing Tony Blair with the same deadpan plausibility, as though both count as civic participation. The key moment is pitched without melodrama: "Standing in the Little Simz show with two snowbunnies / Forgive me Dr Umar it was just the way the day panned out." Funny, loaded, self-incriminating, human. Dave registers the gap between principle and circumstance, taking a moral inventory in real time. Ideology meets contingency, macro-politics telescopes into the micro-social.

Against that overload, Brut Thoughts keeps insisting on congregation. "Putting On a Party" opens like a chopped-and-screwed Vengaboys fever dream and turns the prospect into a serious social proposition. Everyone’s invited: sex workers, clout chasers, grafters, grifters. The gesture never turns twee or utopian. Instead, it recognises that any real community is impure and still necessary. That insistence matters on a record so attentive (and potentially reparative) to the slow erosion of compassion.

The album’s preoccupation with masculinity and inheritance gives that infrastructure an interior cost. "RNA" is its most devastating glance inward. A Björk-esque string interpolation lilts around grief-splashed self-effacement as Dave turns a conversation with God into accusation and plea, briefly throwing responsibility upward for existential horror, then recoiling. The loss of his father hangs here as benchmark: the fear of never becoming “as good” a man, a father, never as present or protective. From there, he interrogates his own overcapacity for empathy, not as uncomplicated virtue but as liability.

"Brut Pop" arrives with singular drive: twisted, vocal-reversed, marching, recalling the musculature and militarism of Sade’s "Soldier of Love". Lyrically, it articulates the record’s refusal to be domesticated. "Fuck fitting in just for the sake / I prefer not integrate." Romance and artistic integrity collapse into a single question of appetite. Meme Gold enters as counter-voice, pulling the track into a shared plunge, and the ferocity of the gang vocal, with Young Fathers’ Kayus, turns the refrain into a pact not to be sanded down. It is massive, a standard-bearer for the record’s whole refusal to compromise.

That refusal keeps Brut Thoughts from the easy gravity of nihilism. "Running Outta Road", with Trainee’s Skinner-cum-Antony Szmeriek cadence, offers cautious affirmations that function as survival ethic: "Eat drink and be merry / If not, why not? / Dress up a lot / Undress a bit / Think / Un-think." Dave’s realism never curdles into paralysis. It insists that you keep moving.

Even the smaller gestures serve the argument. "Mortgage Guy", a midway interlude, distils a structural tragedy into a few lines: losing a relationship to a man who can "button up nice", watching stability seduce where art cannot compete, admitting he was ‘only going to waste [her] time’. It is clarity about what late-capitalist fear trains people to covet, and about our tacit submission to that training.

Brut Thoughts becomes a study of how reference has become cognition, how public life is flattened into content, and how, in the face of that, tenderness can register as bravery. It feels like the kind of document we have been missing since the height of indie sleaze, not because it mimics that era, but because it restores its function: pop-adjacent culture as reportage. Murkage Dave keeps it unsweetened and, against the odds, insistently human.