Live Report: Sleaford Mods, The Demise of Planet X on Dame St.

"What is it about our society that is making us sick?" asked Sukhdev Sandhu in a recent piece about Simon Poulter and Sophie Mellor’s film We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher. Fisher, they argue, “was a translator of frequencies most of us couldn’t hear… a listener, a teacher, a pattern recognizer.”

Across his K-punk blog, Fisher, a remarkable cultural theorist wrote about many things – psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical theory, music and…Sleaford Mods.

Reviewing the band’s 2014 album Divide & Exit for The Wire, Fisher wondered, “Who will make contact with the anger and frustration Williamson articulates - and convert it into a political project?”

Who indeed?

Tonight, Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn, on a stage stripped to bare essentials - laptop, mic stand, stark bedroom mirrors that reflect a ricocheting and hypnotic light show – enthrall and memorize every punter in a show that is like nothing else, anywhere. They plunge mightily into their swashbuckling new record, The Demise of Planet X, indeed spinning a dozen songs from it (by my reckoning only unlucky ‘Don Draper’ gets left behind) and judging by the Olympia mob’s moshing, dancing and yelping, they’ve been all over the album for some time.

Sleaford Mods at 3 Olympia Theatre on February 19 2026. Copyright Jason Doherty/hotpress.com

Proceedings get started with ‘The Unwrap’, Williamson in black T-shirt, shorts and runners, in side profile, snarling “I tugged, between the death of the world I've bought and the new world falling apart”; the one-man orchestra that is Andrew Fearn laying down the first of his magnificent soundscapes that continue to the wrap of ‘Tweet Tweet Tweet’ off 2014’s Divide and Exit.

Fisher arguably wrote about Sleaford Mods better than anyone. In his Divide & Exit review, he wrote of Williamson been inspired by the Wu Tang Clan – “but he repeated their methodology rather than their sound, forcing listeners to adjust to his accent, idiolect and references. This risked bathos - the East Midlands ain’t New York, and Sleaford Mods might have come off as just another comic turn if they weren’t for Williamson’s incendiary intensity.” He spoke too about Mod in relation to the band’s name – “On the face of it,” it doesn’t seem as if there could be anything less 'Mod’ than their sound…Yet Mod was a complex phenomenon, which was always as much about the failure to achieve the glamour attributed to black America as it was about the aspiration towards possessing it. The Mods might have loved Miles and Motown, but when they made music themselves it sounded like The Who and The Jam – rock born with a plastic spoon in its mouth, stuck in a monochromatic England skulking in the shadows cast by America’s Pop Art consumer dreams”.

Sleaford Mods at 3 Olympia Theatre on February 19 2026. Copyright Jason Doherty/hotpress.com

Allow me segway, because it captures the essence of Sleaford Mods’ live performance - they make you groove sure, but essentially they make you think. Fisher writes that political music doesn’t necessarily need to provide solutions - but it must articulate collective feelings. He recognized Sleaford Mods as a key musical example of his theory of Capitalist Realism - “Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?”

SM’s music captures the purgatorial loop of daily life under neoliberalism, articulating a form of class consciousness, providing a voice for the marginalized in a way that aligns with Fisher's theories on cultural resistance, the band's ability to express raw, unfiltered anger and frustration, which Fisher believed was a necessary counter to the sanitised, commercialised and soulless culture of contemporary society. He viewed Sleaford Mods in a post-rave continuum, echoing The Fall, UK Garage minimalism, grime-style spoken delivery and acid-house DIY electronic production.

Sleaford Mods at 3 Olympia Theatre on February 19 2026. Copyright Jason Doherty/hotpress.com

When I spoke with Jason Williamson for last month’s edition of Hot Press, he talked about the necessity of a cultural reset, but he avoided aligning with a clear political movement - this ambiguity is not irresolution, it is diagnostic. Capitalist realism produces a culture where people feel intense dissatisfaction but struggle to imagine structural alternatives. Sleaford Mods capture that contradiction. Their songs are filled with rage, but the rage circles endlessly, rarely pointing toward a coherent future. They embody what Fisher described as a political impasse, a moment when the system feels intolerable yet unavoidable.

And unlike rave culture’s utopian energy, Sleaford Mod’s sound carries little sense of collective escape. The beats loop relentlessly, mirroring the repetitive cycles of precarious work and media outrage. In this sense, their music embodies capitalist realism not only lyrically but structurally.

Despite his reputation for pessimism, Fisher also believed that the very contradictions of capitalist realism could open new possibilities. Sleaford Mods’ popularity hints at a hunger for authenticity and confrontation - evidence that audiences still crave voices that speak directly to lived conditions. Their music raises a question rather than answering it - if this is what late capitalism sounds like, what might come next?

Sleaford Mods at 3 Olympia Theatre on February 19 2026. Copyright Jason Doherty/hotpress.com

What matters inside here tonight is their ability to articulate shared feelings, Sleaford Mods function less like traditional protest musicians and more like emotional barometers. Williamson on ‘The Good Life’ throwing ape-like poses, scared chicken poses, robotic scarecrow poses – a schizoid carousel of personas representative of varying facets of citizenry’s coping mechanisms. And when Andrew’s beats suddenly cease on ‘Dad’s Corner’, Jason cries out vaudeville style and when the galleries react like it’s 1926 on Dame St., he pirouettes like a ballerina and grandiloquently bows. The reflected light show on ‘UK GRIM’ is Clockwork Orange blindingly deranged while the meat puppet workout of ‘No Touch’ is reminiscent of the endured antics of Enda Walsh’s Walworth Farce that ran in this theatre a decade back.

By the time we get to the mash up of wildly scatological ‘Tied Up in Nottz’ and mildly schizophrenic ‘Jobseeker’, we’ve been put through the gamut of emotions where the sole cover of Pet Shop Boy’s ‘West End Girls’ is a curious but compelling sonic erratic. Aye, a Sleaford Mods show is something far beyond mere gig, catch them if you can and if not spin The Demise of Planet X, a recommended balm for the Brave New World.

Who indeed?