Album review: Skunk Anansie – The Painful Truth

You face a dilemma when most people know you for music created three decades ago. While proud of your legacy, like any normal human being you’ve changed since then. Perhaps this – the compromise of meeting expectation with representing who you actually are – is the reason Skunk Anansie haven’t released an album for nine years.

In the end, Skin and her loyal cohorts have simply taken the plunge. Producer David Sitek (Weezer, Chelsea Wolfe, Foals) has encouraged them to drop everything and make new sounds using just fragments of that legacy. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, bassist Cass has been emerging from a battle with stage four cancer. Drummer Mark Richardson now also faces his own, though his has thankfully been caught at an early stage.

The Painful Truth, named in the wake of these episodes, sounds eye-openingly fresh for a band with such history. Opener An Artist Is An Artist hisses rage in quickfire bursts. Skin spits her lines out, almost as if she’s spent the last nine years holding them in. We learn that she does not ‘Put down her pen, put on her hat because of menopause’. Everything about this is new, except its heart-on-sleeve honesty.

Cheers, perhaps the album’s most immediately likeable track, is acerbic middle-aged rage, formless fury replaced by brilliantly directed sarcasm. It’s backed up by Ace’s emotive guitar motif that shows its power in short doses, and a killer hook. While This Is Not Your Life has a sing-aloud hook of the type Skunk have always specialised in, this time it rides on the shoulders of electronic noise, banks of keyboards that might displease rock purists but will fascinate those more open of mind.

The gorgeous Shame is another open-sore ballad in the tradition of Hedonism and Brazen (Weep), but the sound, again, is different – shinier, more expansive, less guitar reliant, and frankly as good as anything they’ve done. So it continues, the band mixing ska with rock, electronics and synths with throbbing bass and disarming melodies. It’s a new Skunk Anansie, who they are now in the wake of personal challenge, but also tips a hat to their extraordinary past.

They’ve never released an album that embraces creativity this openly. My Greatest Moment, for example, is full of ear-catchingly extracurricular sounds – the sort of thing artists in the NIN-to-Starset bracket specialise in, but without sounding like either. Life’s truth might be painful sometimes, but it’s rarely sounded better.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Incubus, Garbage, The Distillers

The Painful Truth is released on May 23 via FLG Records

Brixton, staying true to yourself and making their most difficult record yet: Listen to Skin on Kerrang! In Conversation