Forged in the concrete sprawl of ’80s Midlands Britain, Pop Will Eat Itself have always been less a conventional band and more a cultural collision — chewing up pop culture detritus, political anger, and breakbeat bedlam, then spitting it out in pixelated dayglo. They arrived like a sonic grenade tossed into the polished world of mainstream music, shaking up the scene with their raw, unfiltered energy.
On Delete Everything — their first album in a decade, and the eighth in their wired, riotous career — the Midlands misfits sound like they’ve stumbled across a wormhole linking their grebo-punk past to the AI-fractured now. If you dug the singles they’ve dropped so far, the full album delivers the goods — nothing wasted, not a shred of filler.
It’s a feral, feisty howl of a record: part state-of-the-nation sermon, part dancefloor detonator — an all-caps emergency broadcast from a country teetering on the edge. Yet for all its digital paranoia and dystopian dread, there’s plenty of irreverent, playful angst too — a reminder that sometimes the only sane response to collapse is to dance manically through it.
True to its name, Delete Everything rejects nostalgia’s empty comforts. Sure, there’s a deep vein of classic PWEIzation running through it — from the sample-dense turbulence of This Is the Day… to the abrasive loops of 16 Different Flavours of Hell — — but this LP packs futuristic venom and off-kilter invention, with the same bug-eyed zeal that made them such a singular force in the first place.
On “Superficial Intelligence,” they spit a Molotov manifesto into the digital abyss — a pogo-stomp protest against our algorithm-obsessed era that makes the current age feel even more synthetic than it already does. Equally blistering is brilliantly titled “Never Mind the Botox,” an east-meets-Stourbridge trippy, psyched-out punk sermon that takes aim at the planet’s spiritual decay — a call to arms for those still clinging to authenticity while the rest queue for filters and fillers.
There’s “Play a Fast ’Un” — a crunching, cosmic beast that melds Out of Space-era Prodigy rave energy with the gutter-punk fury of Dos Dedos. Elsewhere, “Incarcerate the Rich” retools “RSVP”-style industrial snarls into a sledgehammer chorus for the eat-the-rich generation, while the jagged, viscous riffs of “Disco Misfits” crash the guest list a la “Everything’s Cool.”
Vocals veer from sneering spitfire rants to anthemic chant-alongs, guitars are as gloriously guttural as ever, and the Poppies’ signature voice samples return like spectral transmissions from a bygone era. In 2025, when most acts sound like they’ve forgotten what being human really means, PWEI remind us what it’s all about — authentic, urgent, and unfiltered.
Delete Everything is vicious, vital, and vacuum-packed with bulletproof choruses for a world falling apart at the seams.
Is everybody happy? I know this reviewer bloody well is.
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