Declan McKenna earned a reputation for being politically precocious early on, winning the Glastonbury festival’s emerging talent competition as a 16-year-old with a song about corruption in world football, and going on to criticise transgender conversion therapy and right-wing patriotism in his early releases.
Now 21, and releasing his second album, he’s left his angriest moment off the tracklist, last year’s standalone single British Bombs. Instead he’s taken the maxim “What would David Bowie do?” as his central pillar. McKenna is to Bowie what Sam Fender is to Bruce Springsteen, so joyful in his worship that the many similarities in style come across as enjoyable emulation rather than cynical pastiche.
The space-age sleeve and the title, Zeros, could even be a way to sit self-deprecatingly next to Bowie’s “Heroes”.
So there’s a lot of Ashes to Ashes in the slightly queasy keyboards of The Key to Life on Earth. In some of the retrofuturist sounds — the digitised vocals repeating “jet black” at the start of Rapture, for example — there’s a clear unease about the world to come. Although “Mrs Thatcher” gets a namecheck, so do Quavers crisps and Nike trainers. The issues here are less specific, unsettling in a vaguer way. A character called Daniel, who appears in two songs, appears to have committed a crime; the world keeps ending.
Thankfully the music, all punchy guitars and rolling keyboards, is so stirring that we’ll go out dancing.
