Today's Song of the Day, as chosen by Kevin Cole, host of Drive Time on KEXP, is "Hope Gets Harder" by Martha, from the 2022 album Please Don't Take Me Back on Specialist Subject.
British pop-punkers Martha have been spreading messages of anarchy since 2014 when they released their debut album Courting Strong. They’ve dropped three more records since, with the latest being this year’s Please Don’t Take Me Back. The record proves that the band from a small town called Pity Me continue to pity no one, especially the Powers That Be controlling the state of the UK.
Our Song of the Day, “Hope Gets Harder,” hones in on this idea, targeting the rich and powerful who are killing hope and optimism at a rapid rate. “Drain the blood from every diamond /On this damp and hateful island,” they cry over a sprititedly brisk riff before closing the song with the pointed claim, “Every day the hope gets harder/ England is a funeral parlor.”
In a lengthy statement about the song, the band don’t mince words on what they mean by that:
“‘Hope Gets Harder’ is a song about England: a uniquely fucking terrible idea,” the band said in a statement. “A place governed by the most absurdly mediocre people in history. Selfish, rich, thick, malevolent ghouls propped up by a bootlicking, self-congratulating, stenographic, client-journalist news media that puts North Korea to shame. England is a grey, damp artifice, vibrating to a quasi-fascist background hum, where the majority live miserable hopeless lives, so that a tiny minority can live in extravagant luxury. As we lurch violently from one crisis to the next, it feels like the light of any hope for the future is slowly dying. But we have to try and find hope in one another, and together we have to fight like hell for a more socially and ecologically just world. No fate but what we make for ourselves. Abolish england. Fuck the king.”
Watch the cleverly illustrated music video for “Hope Gets Harder” by Nathan Stephens-Griffin below.
