Nodding to Bowie and the Beatles on songs about climate change and capitalism, the 21-year-old songwriter roots his political critique in the rich tradition of British protest rock.
“What do you think about the rocket I built?” howls Declan McKenna on the first track of Zeros. It’s a cheeky nod at the gap between his uneven 2017 debut album, What Do You Think About the Car?, and this one: not a natural progression, but a staggering improvement. McKenna, a 21-year-old British singer-songwriter once hailed as a teen prodigy, has shed his boy-wonder baby fat. Zeros is an ambitious attempt at his own Tommy, a sprawling concept album about scrappy survivors spiraling through space and searching for meaning at the end of the world. Its characters war with one another across a musical palette that spans Sgt. Pepper to “Space Oddity.”
The record’s standout track, “Daniel, You’re Still a Child,” is its Rosetta Stone—not to mention the best U2 song in about 15 years. The character of Daniel recurs throughout the album, but McKenna leaves his role ambiguous, a narrative Rorschach test. He seems to me a boozing absentee father, but he could also be a lousy boyfriend or a troublemaking prodigal son. The video for “The Key to Life on Earth” suggests a spookier storyline: Daniel as sinister doppelganger, played by actor Alex Lawther, invading McKenna’s home and eating his food before bludgeoning him to death.
The video could easily double as an episode of Black Mirror; fans will recognize Lawther as the blackmailed sex criminal of Season 3’s “Shut Up and Dance.” But McKenna relegates science fiction to the album’s opening tracks. The elaborate musical nods to Bowie and the Beatles on “You Better Believe!!!” and “Be an Astronaut” place space exploration squarely in the 1960s, when it was still a democratic pursuit, not a hobby for union-busting billionaires. “You were born to be an astronaut,” McKenna sings of Daniel, “and you’ll do it or die trying.” Daniel settles, sadly, for the latter. The Space Age comes to an end. A chilly Bono-in-Berlin vibe sweeps through the album as Daniel degenerates, giving way to Blurry Britrock as modern forms of villainy—online radicalization (“Twice Your Size”), climate change (“Sagittarius A*”), surveillance capitalism (“Beautiful Faces”)—rear their ugly heads.
This approach occasionally makes the album feel like a collage of 40 years’ worth of MOJO covers. But McKenna isn’t in the business of imitation or idolatry. He deploys these references carefully, in chronological order, drawing a clean arc through history to root his own political critique in the rich tradition of British protest rock. Take “Rapture,” where, with absolute confidence, he mispronounces “the laws of nature” to force a rhyme with “Mrs. Thatcher.” At first, it may seem a bit retrograde—a Margaret Thatcher takedown in 2020? But the song makes an elegant argument: The witch isn’t dead at all, but risen again; the stench of her corpse lingers in modern Britain. There is a straight line from the Sex Pistols’ grievances to McKenna’s own.
McKenna’s strongest work, prior to Zeros, was the blunt FIFA protest anthem “Brazil,” written when he was just 15 and stunning in its maturity and moral clarity. Those qualities return in the defiant eco-feminist arc of Zeroes. He begins the album on a rocket in outer space, screaming, “We’re going to get ourselves killed!”, and ends on a “marvelous beach,” accepting the impermanence of life on Earth: “Everybody leaves eventually, darling.” By making peace with his own mortality, McKenna underscores the urgency of ensuring our planet outlives us. “Sagittarius A*” condemns industrialists for their delusions of escaping climate emergency by colonizing Mars: “You think your money’s gonna stop you getting wet? … Noah, you best start building.” There is a subtly Luddite bent to the political demands of Zeros, which are threefold: Disconnect your phone, burn your money, and commence your walk eastward into the rising sun.
With Zeros, McKenna expands his conceptual scope and introduces more shades of grey in his storytelling. Not all of his creative risks pay off, though. The best concept albums carefully offset their arena-rock assaults with moments for the mosh pit to catch its breath. Zeros would benefit from another down-tempo “Emily” or two, as well as more connective tissue and clarity in its narrative. But despite the wobbly sequencing and foggy structure, the album is a bright flare from a promising talent. McKenna doesn’t simply pay homage to his musical heroes; he jerry-rigs the history of British rock to ask how we got ourselves into this mess, and how the hell we might get out.
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