https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UExeiUowvw&app=desktop
 

“CAPITALISM is failing all but the chosen few …” So shouts the opening line of the Artificially Yours manifesto, an all-capital letter tirade against consumerism, convention and the cult of celeb reality.

No surprise then that the title track of their new EP The Merger is so uncompromising.“I want people to stop and go: 'What was that?'” says Chat. “It is a bit different. We may not be polished, but I like that. It is rough and ready and dark and noisy as hell.”

Channelling drone rock, garage, punk and influences like Throbbing Gristle, Butthole Surfers and Spacemen 3, The Merger is accompanied by a video juxtaposing military dictators, magic mushrooms, scenes of destruction, 1960s counterculture gone wrong and more. Not easy listening.

“It’s a social commentary on the way the world has gone over the past few years,” adds Chat, “I write about things that I see around me in society, things that are ongoing.” It makes you wonder where he actually lives.

The band actually hail from London’s commuter belt — it could be any identikit town — and that’s where the music comes into its own. The second track, Terror Town, is wildly different in sound and approach to the first while the third, Tree, takes on an MC5 garage rock riff and ramps the speed up higher.

The band seems to cross genres rather than just bash out a repeated formula, with disco-driven tracks in the live set and more.

Terror Town’s slower, somewhat soulful and even funk-driven groove is reminiscent of mid-1970s Iggy Pop, again driving home the message of alienation and atomisation. The lyrics are discernible but not necessarily decipherable. “This was more about how you can fade away in a standard town, people just drift away into nothing.”

It’s also about how society has changed for the worse and how that seems to be speeding up. “Everything has been squeezed so hard,” says Chat. “I was brought up in a socialist house, my father was a postman and union rep. In his day, the canteen at his workplace was open to local pensioners to get subsidised food. Now there’s no canteen. And with jobs there’s five people working flat out now doing what 20 used to do.

“My dad did loads of voluntary work, but now people are getting less and less motivated in their communities and more out for themselves. People moan a lot about things but don’t want to do something positive.”

Reality television and the desire to be famous, says Chat, has taken over so much of people’s lives. “It is increasingly the way to get out of where you are, to sell yourself or gain notoriety. I can understand it, but it’s not a great path to go down.”

That doesn’t mean we have brought up a generation that is either fame-hungry or just indifferent. People are being enthused by politics — he highlights the increase in Labour membership under Corbyn — but Chat still fears increasing isolation and ever more reliance on technology.

“Look at mobile phones, people can’t not look at Facebook every 30 seconds, they isolate themselves from people in the room and relationships fall apart because people stopped taking notice of each other.

“I write a lots of lyrics about people and phones, we’re tied into contracts, there’s all these algorithms and ways people are targeted, all that Orwellian-type stuff. Somebody is watching you all the time and they know what you are up to and they are manipulating you.”

And that feeds into real lives.“People can’t even be bothered to go to a shop now, are they really too busy?” says Chat.

It seems the Artificially Yours manifesto is also a response to a high street and a society that has been “blanded out of existence” with the rise of chains and the likes of Ocado, Amazon and Deliveroo dealing with depositing instant gratification on the doorstep.

“People have been mollified, anything could happen and they just roll over and let it happen. You can make life too easy and too unchallenging. We have a junk food, junk telly, junk everything culture. We should be better than that in 2018,” Chat says.

“The hardest thing is to stay angry.”

Having previously played in bands received with “varying degrees of indifference,” the one thing Chat and Artificially Yours seem certain to deliver is a reaction.

If that can be directed to drive change and challenge the status quo, then The Merger may be the start of a musical message that helps shake a generation out of its mobile phone-sated stupor into demanding something so much better.

The Merger is released on Friday August 24 on 1-2-3-4 Records and Artificially Yours play the Old Blue Last, Shoreditch, London on August 29 and the Victoria, Dalston, London on September 13.