Album review: grandson – INERTIA

Collectively, we’re exhausted. We’re either boiling over with fury or scrolling ourselves into numbness, shrugging shoulders and covering our eyes from any encroaching apocalypse. Not grandson. Jordan Benjamin is refusing and resisting in a louder, heavier fashion than ever, turning away from the more personal tones of 2023’s I Love You I’m Trying to give a white-hot reading of the riot act to the people in power upholding the systems that are suffocating us. Disenchanted he may be, but he will not be resigned to defeat.

Jordan’s properly sharpened his blades for his third album, recording exclusively with live instruments for the first time, and it makes all the difference. His tones are bristling and muscular, placing him firmly as part of a dynasty of musical rebels armed with a guitar and an amp. His insights are thought yet cutting, unafraid to be confrontational – and to get uncomfortable. The jagged AUTONOMOUS DELIVERY ROBOT stares into a crystal ball at a technological dystopia that’s not so far out of reach, while the darkly grooving SELF-IMMOLATION muses upon the ultimate sacrifice made by Aaron Bushell, who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in the U.S. last April to protest America's complicity in the atrocities in Palestine.

It gets ruthlessly candid. BRAINROT despairs at the mindless sleepwalking towards disaster and the erosion of empathy in a digital fog – ‘Watch as the winter warms up like summer / Watch it all through your new smartphone / With a battery mined by a child in a war zone.’ Meanwhile, on the seething YOU MADE ME THIS WAY (which takes the crown for the record’s best chorus), he illustrates the indivisibility between the personal and the political. ‘I was born in a country that only thought I mattered / When I was an embryonic sack of cells beside my mother’s bladder.’ That contemplation runs riverlike through WHO’S THE ENEMY, in which he invites Bob Vylan to soberly cast an eye upon the ways marginalised groups are wrongly vilified.

Dark times produce a glut of protest music, but what grandson makes is far too urgent to ever get lost in the righteous noise. It’s also easily the best album he’s made. Hit play, go out, and change the world.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Rage Against The Machine, FEVER 333, Bob Vylan

INERTIA is released on September 5 via XX Recordings/Create Music