For those who have been searching for another singer of “substance” besides Billie Eilish to materialize from Gen Z, one supposes British songwriter Declan McKenna is the latest to be unearthed amid the paucity of generational spokespeople. Even the name Declan smacks of being part of a new generation, one decidedly more… let’s say “sensitive.”
At moments echoing the voice of David Bowie and, at others, Elliott Smith (hear: “Emily”), McKenna was begat of a musical amalgam out of the past. Or the future, if one prefers to see it that way. His other effortless comparisons are to Patrick Wolf and Miles Kane (or what Kane wished he could have achieved with his rather unlistenable debut, Coup de Grace). But by and large, he is his own musician, which isn’t an easy feat when one is so young and still trying to form their sound. Something he already navigated on his first record, What Do You Think About the Car?, released in 2017 when he was eighteen years old (turning nineteen in December of that year, a proud Capricorn cusping Sagittarius, as evidenced by a certain song title on his sophomore album). Plus, he had already gone through the same “breakout star” thing that Eilish had when “Ocean Eyes” came out, only with McKenna, it was “Brazil” when he was sixteen.
The cover of Zeros alone shows the quick evolution of McKenna’s style, going from some kind of greasy sexpot down to cater to notions of child pornography while he still can in the image for What Do You Think About the Car? to the distorted glam rock take on a Jacobean aesthetic for the former. For those who can’t believe the swift change, it’s fitting that McKenna should open the record with “You Better Believe!!!,” an exuberant ditty contrasted by an apocalyptic sense of the world as conveyed in lyrics such as, “Watching your requiem on screen/Gather ’round for the final scene/Where you were sold away one summer’s day last year/Oh, I’m sorry, my dear/The asteroid’s here.” Indeed, an asteroid is drawing rather close to earth a day before the election. But McKenna is merely referring to an imminent catastrophe that no amount of upcycled clothing can mitigate.
Things slow down to get all ethereal and Bowie-esque for the dreamy, melancholic “Be An Astronaut.” With its gradual build to a surfeit of guitars (with a sound out of the more classic rock era), McKenna explores the theme of being a child filled with hope, addressing “Daniel,” who comes up again on a later track, the likely representation of every boy who ever once felt the unbridled promise of his future as only youth can bolster. Like wanting to become an astronaut, everything seems within the realm of possibility, even if that realm is literally as far out of reach as possible. As McKenna stated of the track, “…it’s [about] recalling something, recalling thoughts of a childhood, thoughts of growing up and experiencing hardships and experiencing grief. It became quite central to giving the album its spaciness, or at least an aspiration to go to space. I think the album maybe exists in a world not far from our own, but definitely dreams of something bigger. And I think that the whole thing in ‘Be an Astronaut’ is that dreams can be damaging and can often be unattainable…” Amen.
So it is that we transition to a song that might tell us how to deal with such a reality, “The Key to Life on Earth.” Only instead it seems to further illuminate the pratfalls of growing older as one looks around and sees the state of affairs right in their own suburban neighborhood. For that is what McKenna describes in the form of: “The thing is, these out-of-touch scrounging rich kids/Are living here for free/On my home turf/The key to life on Earth”–which is ostensibly to be born a rich kid. In order to drive home the point about the affluent moving in on everything that you love, McKenna enlisted his own lookalike, Alex Lawther (of The End of the Fucking World), to serve as a sort of parasitic Siamese twin, gradually attaching to him as he goes to all the same places, eats from his proverbial “trough” and even shares his bed. Until finally, Lawther, dressed in a cockroach costume, ousts McKenna altogether. It’s quite a poetic manifestation of gentrification, even if there are no persons of color included.
The first single from the record, “Beautiful Faces,” escalates the tripped out aural motif McKenna is striving for. Just as “The Key to Life on Earth” had a “Baby, You’re A Rich Man” theme, so, too, does this–except applied to beauty and even more sonically emulative of said Beatles song. Discussing the pressures of living in a world where, despite the faux touting of body positivity and inclusivity, “beautiful” people continue to be paraded all around us as they’re held up on the pedestal of “What To Aspire To,” McKenna resignedly worships, “The beautiful faces smiling over us/Lift your hands up and lead us back home/Beautiful people won’t remember you, honey/I bet you can’t get enough/Beautiful faces smiling over us/Lift your hands up and lead us back home.” With this sardonic tone, McKenna presents “the beautiful ones” as our unspoken leaders, showing us the way toward a life of constant self-hate.
The paternalistic “Daniel, You’re Still a Child” proves that “men” with that name never really seem to transcend out of their boyhood folly. Except in this instance, it is precisely because Daniel is a child that he should not yet be judged so harshly. Alas, the nature of society as an entity designed to quickly classify so that it might weed out the riff raff (a.k.a. non-income producing) as soon as possible makes a lack of harsh judgment unfathomable. Thus, damning children so soon with these short-sighted assessments tends to lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon, which McKenna encapsulates with, “What is wrong with Daniel, he’s no fun/You just wait ’till Daniel hurts someone/Daniel, you’re a weirdo, what the hell?/You just wait ’till Daniel hurts himself.”
Keeping with the trend of songs named after proper nouns, “Emily” is one of the most standout songs on the record, replete with its forlorn twanginess–even if that name has lately been ruined by Darren Star thanks to the creation of Emily in Paris. As close to a capella as he can get, the guitar string instrumentation is minimalist, serving only as the background designed to complement McKenna’s voice. Wielding the word “child” this time as a patronizing insult, McKenna had stated he modeled the tone after one of Bob Dylan’s “mean” songs–one imagines “Like A Rolling Stone” is usually the template for that.
“Emily” is followed by the more visceral “Twice Your Size”–a potentially offensive title in this politically correct hot potato of an environment. And, speaking of environment, McKenna has dubbed this song “an environmentalist jam.” Written during the period when he thought he would center the concept of each song on Zeros around how the world could end, in this scenario it “seems to be some kind of environmental collapse, or like the sun has gotten too big and everyone’s trying to get off Earth. It also represents the way that discourse happens now. Like, it only means half as much when you say it twice, and that relates to so many things right now, where whoever’s talking the loudest gets heard…” Ergo Führer Trump still having such an incredibly attentive audience.
In the spirit of the “end of days” thread comes the next track. Like Blondie’s “Rapture,” McKenna’s song of the same name is filled with whimsy and wonder–even if the subject is again about the locusts descending upon the Earth (which they literally have this year), so to speak. Despite his young age, McKenna, as a Brit, clearly still knows the weight of invoking Margaret Thatcher’s name (he himself now being a child of Boris Johnson’s England, begat by the politics of Thatcher). Thus, he sings, “Mrs. Thatcher/Your cruel heart navigates the world we live in/With its anger/Going nowhere, coming at ya.” Screaming toward the end with his most tortured vocals of the album, one gets the collective sense of Gen Z’s agony over the prospects of their so-called future, with half of the world seeming to say the end is nigh and the other saying it’s all hunky-dory (in other words, Dems versus Republicans, Labour Party versus the Tories). One supposes your worldview all depends on how much you’re profiting from the destruction of the Earth.
What kind of Capricorn so closely cusping Sag would McKenna be without a song honoring his “almost” zodiac? So it is that we have “Sagittarius A*”–granted, it’s an homage to “the name of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.” Thus the rhythm is accordingly hippie-dippy and otherworldly as McKenna croons, “You don’t have to be sad about it, Mother Nature/Don’t let the boys try to doubt it, spoil our fun/’Cause your reaction’s all that they want/So just like you said to me once, have a day off.” Firmly addressing his stance on climate change with far more grace and modesty than his peer, Greta Thunberg, McKenna’s overarching message throughout the record is one of concern for the future of this planet.
The concluding track on the standard edition is “Eventually, Darling.” Pertaining to the analog problem of l’amour (or, more to the point, losing it), McKenna also alludes to the increasingly fast pace at which life and events unfold and are absorbed (usually not at all because everyone is so quick to move on to the next thing). Going back to the “information-action ratio” that Arctic Monkeys made a central focus on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, McKenna confirms, “…change can be brutal, and it fits into the narrative of the album. It’s just a very simple idea that life is always changing and the modern world is changing at a faster rate than we can keep up with.”
For those with the Japanese edition, the final two tracks consist of demo versions of “Who Do I Think I Am” and “Colour Collider.” The lo-fi production, therefore, is more noticeable in contrast, but the weightiness of McKenna’s lyrics remain unmarred as he accuses, “The man don’t know you/And the man is both boring and ageing/With your sense of self both gnawing and raging, and shifting and unkind/Adolescence is both out of sight, out of mind” on “Who Do I Think I Am.” “Colour Collider” does, in fact, have a decidedly Japanese vibe, with its slow-paced, lilting music and lyrics. Especially lackadaisical in the final minute, McKenna attacks this type of particle accelerator with, “You just make a mess of things that are simple/Well, simple as much as anything simple in this life.” Once again, McKenna seems to be throwing shade at his fellow man, all of them, ultimately, Zeros in the eyes of a merciless Mother Nature.
