Viagra Boys – Cave World
In case the news was caught by the spam filters, Viagra Boys are back with a third album, continuing the acerbic aesthetic and swaggering satire of Street Worms and Welfare Jazz. The prehistoric title shouldn’t fool anyone: Cave World is about the here and now – a world built by Internet trolls and intellectual dwarves who think civilisation peaked before it actually began. Frontman Sebastian Murphy mines these contradictions for some of Viagra Boys’ most penetrating lyrics to date, embodying the warped perspective of anti-vaxxers (Creepy Crawlers), anarcho-primitivists (Troglodyte) and all-round conspiracy gibbons (Return to Monke).
At the throbbing core of all these unsavoury character sketches is the toxic masculinity skewered in the Swedish band’s ironic name. From the opening strains of Baby Criminal (sprung from the same gene pool as Pearl Jam’s Do the Evolution), the record’s thematic bedrock of Man as a barely evolved organism emerges from a primordial soup of syncopated grooves and squawking saxophone. Through 12 selections of perfectly produced post-punk, Murphy growls about these men spreading hate online, bringing guns to work and spouting absurdities around vaccines: “Our children are growing up with lizard gills and animal hair!”
Viagra Boys administer another dose of musical adventure, ditching the country nods of Welfare Jazz for Beck-style drum patterns (Big Boy) and even some record scratches (Return to Monke). Dog lovers might be disappointed to find the earlier albums’ Best in Show interludes replaced by glitchy instrumentals (Cave Hole, Globe Earth and Human Error) that once again highlight the stupidity of using a computer to demand the destruction of society. Nowhere is this better stated than on second single Troglodyte, a sharp-tongued critique of the gun-nut yearning for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that would literally eat him alive. If that’s where the conspiracy theorist’s red pill leads, give us the little blue one every time.
Dan Meier
Photo: Andre Jofre
Cave World is released on 8th July 2022. For further information or to order the album visit Cave World’s website here. The album is available in Hi-Res on Qobuz and all the major streaming services.
Watch the video for the single Ain’t No Thief here:
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