I leave work early, pushed out by storm Claudia. The sky is a swollen bruise, rain hammering hard enough to cancel trains in every direction. I’m standing in it—damp collar, damp shoes, damp everything. Half resentful, half resigned.
Suspicious Package by Tape It Shut opens with rain and tannoy announcements, as if it’s been eavesdropping. Not clever, not coincidental—just the grey, mundane texture of England in 2025, where delays and downpours are the wood-chip wallpaper of daily life. Today it syncs with mine. A kind of cosmic alignment, though the cosmos here is metallic and spent.
The train I board is older than me, and I’m far too old for this routine. The carriage exhales with collective resignation.
Suspicious Package doesn’t offer escape routes. It doesn’t whisk me to another country or pretend a fresh vantage awaits if I could just afford a different postcode or just “change my mindset”. It stays in the same sour air I breathe, holding up a mirror to the UK in 2025.
The reflection isn’t flattering. The far right swelling again. Wages so thin they feel like a ruse. Employers demanding gratitude while stripping time, dignity, and the last scraps of mental health. Every necessity—train fare, bread, rent, a coat against the rain—priced punitively. Public services gutted, then scolded for not standing upright, patched with Blu-Tack that long ago lost its stick.
And leisure? Framed as indulgence. Pleasure treated like betrayal—of the nation, your ancestors, some imagined stoic ideal no one ever lived up to. You’re reminded daily that your purpose is to feed the billionaires, keep their share prices swollen, while they drip poison into the discourse. They want the serfs spitting bile at anyone whose accent strays from yours, whose skin tone doesn’t match the skimmed milk you can’t afford to pour over your own-brand Weetabix.
This record doesn’t let me look away from the terror or the exhaustion. It insists I stay in the room with all of it and stare back into its dreadful, unblinking visage. And weirdly—there’s comfort in that. Not hope, exactly. More like validation. A hand on your shoulder saying, “Yeah, mate, it’s not just you. The world is fucked. You’re not imagining it.”
By the midpoint of the album, the carriage windows are fogged, and shapes of wet towns blur by—brick, billboard, cash converters, vape shop, charity shop, repeat. England rendered in beige and debt. Behind me, someone coughs the kind of cough that suggests they haven’t seen a GP since before the first reboot of austerity—and couldn’t get an appointment now even if they tried. Someone else mutters at delay announcements like a dystopian antiphony. The normal soundtrack of national decline.
And yet—there’s a lift. A small ember of defiance buried in the record’s cynicism. A reminder that acknowledging the rot is the first step to resisting it. That the world is unbearable, yes, but we’re still somehow in it, still noticing, still capable of refusing the part we’ve been assigned. Even if the system wants you too tired to care, there’s a quiet power in the simple act of paying attention.
By the time I step off the train, the rain has downgraded from biblical to merely miserable. My clothes cling to my aching meat-vessel of a body, my bag leaks, leaving my employer’s IT equipment damp—kit I’ll have to switch on the moment I get home. But something in me has steadied. Suspicious Package hasn’t cheered me up—it’s not that kind of record—but it’s given shape to the formless dread. Turned the haze into something with edges I can trace.
Sometimes that’s enough. Not hope. Not solace. Just the knowledge that the world can be named honestly—and that somewhere out there, someone else is pissed off at the same grey sky, listening to the same sodden soundtrack, refusing to go numb out of sheer spite.
Maybe that’s the only victory some days: feel the rain, name the horror, keep walking anyway.
You can buy Suspicious Package directly from Cat’s Claw Records, where it’s available now for pre-order on CD or vinyl.
