Cursed Murphy certainly anticipated the summer of 2020 on last year’s single ‘Foxhole Prayer’, an ominous industrial banger teeming with apocalyptic imagery: “Outside my door sounds like a war / They’re hacking up the tarmac, shuttering the bars / Give me one more beer before war’s declared.”

An inspired mix of left-field electronica, punk guitar rhythms and atmospheric soundscapes, the album successfully mines similar themes of social and political upheaval. An acclaimed novelist, frontman Peter Murphy’s monologues are always a delight, alternately scathing, empathic, insightful and defiant. Particularly powerful is ‘The Poor Mouth’, a meditation on struggle and laced with loathing for the political establishment: “Minister, if I may be bold, do you remember the last time you were cold? / No, really cold, I mean, fucking freezing / I mean, breathing vapour, sleeping in your overcoat.”

Murphy also has a nice line in Leonard Cohen-style mordant humour, as evidenced on ‘The Resistance’: “No matter what giant ball of shite threatens to strike the earth / We’ll show no fear.” The album’s undercurrent of optimism finds its full expression on closer ‘We Are Dead Stars’, a wonderful piece of Joycean lyricism.

• Out now.