2020

A man wakes in the middle of the night to the glowing screen of his partner’s iPhone. He sees a flirty text from an unfamiliar number and sneaks to the kitchen for a carving knife to enact his revenge. If this were the extent of “Heart Emoji,” a highlight on Richard Dawson’s new album 2020, it would still be a strange, modern horror story. But there’s more. Additional details include the phone’s passcode (daughter’s date of birth), the contents of the text message (“I miss you ❤️”), the unwelcome creatures infesting their home (spider, slug), the music playing in the narrator’s earbuds (classical), and a story of how the couple met that leaves you questioning their power dynamic and long-held resentment toward each other. It’s a lot to process—and this is one of the shortest, simplest tracks on the album.

The songs on 2020 all involve first-person narratives that tend to swerve toward grander, anti-capitalist themes, set in Dawson’s native UK. “Obviously a lot of talk has been about Brexit,” he recently told Q Magazine, “but there’s so many other things without the fanfare.” To accompany these complex stories, he makes music that’s equally overstuffed. In “Heart Emoji,” there’s a creeping guitar part—the sound of stalking through the house at three in the morning—and a wobbly synth solo that mimics a blurry unnatural light in a dim room. Dawson himself, a singer whose thick Geordie accent and primal howl seem to emerge from somewhere deep in his stomach, is restless in his delivery, slurring and braying and dipping into a squeaky, heartbroken falsetto to deliver the words “heart emoji,” as if the thought alone might bring him to tears.

Those two words—“heart” and “emoji”—offer a good survey of the album’s themes. On his previous record, 2017’s Peasant, Dawson explored the medieval age, using archaic diction and characters whose dark, grotesque humor left you wondering how distant the past really is. But in the present, amid vape shops and YouTube channels, watching soccer and eating brunch, he finds just as much barbarism. “I don’t want to go into work this morning,” he sings in the opening song, “I just want to lie here and play the new Call of Duty.” And if you think there’s a metaphor somewhere to be uncovered, he makes his point even plainer a few lines later: “I refuse to do this filthy work anymore,” he sings, bellowing the word “refuse” several more times until it sounds like he’s having an actual breakdown.

It’s Dawson’s least beautiful music, but it’s also his most expressive. By comparison, Peasant was lush, conventional even, with its sing-song melodies and pastoral texture. On 2020, the arrangements are proudly inorganic as they lurch and blast, sputter and break. The long-form structure of the record feels more like a short story collection, and taking it in front-to-back can have an overwhelming, exhausting effect. But unlike the sometimes hopeless characters in his songs, Dawson can wield this glut of information in his favor. The extraordinary first single, “Jogging,” embodies this challenge: Dawson sings about seeking therapy in exercise as he tries to cram his thoughts into its vaguely motivational rock melody. It seems like a tight, uncomfortable fit, and that’s precisely the point.

For “Jogging” and several other songs, Dawson took inspiration from conversations he had with fans at shows, and his intimate tone makes you consider words and phrases you’ve never heard in a folk-rock song before: dehumidifier, voluntary redundancy, Nando’s. There’s a level of difficulty to this combination of banality and mythology (minotaurs and sirens also lurk these songs), and Dawson’s mastery as a writer guides you along without hiding the awkwardness of addressing the world at its ugliest. Compared with other sprawling, self-referential works from this year—say, Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! or Bill Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest—Dawson succeeds by finding surreality and horror in his everyday musings. The title seems pointed, referring both to our near future and the power of hindsight.

While the album is placed in hypermodern scenarios, in a world burdened with violence, xenophobia, and generational exhaustion, its most stunning moments lead you to unexpected places. There’s “Black Triangle,” a tale of a UFO sighting that patiently evolves into a less fantastical tale of being dumped for a pilates teacher. Even more ambitious is “Fulfillment Centre,” a 10-minute parable that takes place inside of an Amazon shipping warehouse, transporting you with shuffling sound effects and a robotic call-and-response. “There has to be more to life than killing yourself to survive,” Dawson sings in the closest thing this album has to a thesis statement. Of course, there’s no easy answer, so to follow it, he gives us this thought: “One day I’m going to run my own cafe.” For a minute, the music turns bittersweet and his words feel so tender and close that you could hold them in your hand. And one day, you think, maybe he will.

Buy: Rough Trade

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