Surviving under capitalism is a drag—it’s the oldest story in rock’n’roll—but No Home captures the weight of its dehumanization in a uniquely visceral way.
No Home has been aware of precarity for a long time. The solo project of London-based musician Charlie Valentine, No Home gained well-deserved attention in recent years opening for Big Joanie, Priests, and Moor Mother, playing the city’s Decolonise Fest, and releasing a series of EPs that seethe with critiques of capitalism and exploitation. If industrial music was meant to echo the alienation of mechanical factory labor, No Home’s unhurried progressions, minimalist percussion, and bursts of distortion mimic the disorientation of being locked out of labor-time to begin with. Fucking Hell is punk the way reclaiming your time is punk. On their full-length debut, Valentine’s powerful voice and experimental song structures dilate and expand time, pushing against the boundaries of genre and resisting enclosure. Surviving under capitalism is a drag—it’s the oldest story in rock’n’roll—but No Home captures the weight of its dehumanization in a uniquely visceral way.
Valentine’s voice is the clear centerpiece of the album. It stretches expansively, shapeshifting from a mesmerizing full-bodied blues vocal on “Burning the Body” to Liz Phair deconstructed alt-rock on “I Couldn’t Cry Before I Wrote EPs” (where “I think I’m paranoid” seems to cite Shirley Manson); from Thom Yorke in outer space on “Secondary Actor” to a waxing swell on the meditative “Exile.” Valentine does with their voice what many noise musicians hope to do with their soundscapes: It is both the shifting emotional core and the steady unspooling that holds the song together. Its breadth creates a space of undoing.
The record’s narrative rests on classic transitional moments—graduating, looking for a job, trying to find steady footing. But these songs are not stumbling pauses along a well-lit upward path, as in some sort of Boomer imaginary; they’re elegies for the swamp of exploitation and humiliation, where the cost of entry is your self-worth and any rewards are fleeting and illusory. Valentine’s depiction of this headspace is brutally funny and also devastating, as in a memorable line from “The Perfect Candidate”: “Sorry we’ve considered other applicants/Good luck/Have a nice job search/Have you ever considered/Fucking off forever?” In “4x4,” which zeroes in on the music industry’s particular indignities (playing for free, emailing gatekeepers), Valentine returns to a line that escalates to a near-howl: “Say you wanna do this for life/Are you being realistic, baby?” It’s simultaneously one of the record’s most chilling moments and one of its best hooks. A quiet moment in “Candidate” hits just as hard: “I wish I could be worth more than this.”
Valentine turns that same incisiveness inward, digging into themselves and their creative process. “I Couldn’t Cry Before I Wrote EPs” is ostensibly about music-making as an alternative to therapy because therapy itself is too expensive, but also about the double-bind of performing your pain for an audience. The song’s dissonance stretches in opposite directions, opening with ominous keyboard noise but veering into pop melodies, as if trying to stay one step ahead of itself. “You masturbate to my misery,” Valentine sings, “I learn how to cry in public.” Their narrator twists in the gaze, fighting to trust themself while remaining keenly aware of the pressure to be consumable. “Only white people dream of utopias,” Valentine sings, resisting any neat resolution. Economic and personal insecurities (and all the ways they intertwine) exert their ruthless gravity even as the record fights to pull out of their grasp.
Although the songs on Fucking Hell take different forms, all are stripped down to such sharp immediacy it feels like you’re hearing them at a house show. The sparse instrumentation creates a folk intimacy, foregrounding Valentine’s vocals and furthering the sense of temporal dislocation. The plaintive “A B- in This Economy” and “The Perfect Candidate” have the conversational tone of Sneaks or Frankie Cosmos, while the foreboding bursts of noise and eerie vocal samples in “Couldn’t Cry” and “Catholic School Never Taught Me How to Talk to Men” are as haunted and avenging as Moor Mother or early EMA tracks. But though No Home traverses indie rock cosmology, the project is singularly itself. Eschewing traditional pop structures, songs meander and change direction: There is no neat narrative to pain, no efficient linearity outside of the ruthless logic of capitalist production.
That’s not to say there aren’t moments of release. Despite themes of debt and social anxiety, “Drink! You’re One of Us” is a fun, uptempo rocker with clear melodic hooks. Album closer “YY” is surprisingly pop, with the melancholy warmth of a Tracy Chapman song and a more traditional chorus that includes both a line about “doing good by your neighbor” and the skeptical refrain, “Don’t quite like the fruits of your labor.” There is no escape, but there are moments of reprieve: mutual aid, community support, collective and individual resistance. “YY” breaks the fever of despondency, allowing some cathartic sweetness to sneak in. “I made a good thing out of a bad situation,” Valentine sings, “Maybe I’m okay with my fall from grace.”
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