What a pair of fucking fakes.

This pair of papier-mache punks with their mockney lip-flapping, fag-paper-thin-sentiment, derivative riffs, embarrassingly prescriptive pseudo-politics and sixth form poetry, firing barbs as prickly as soup. These two fucking fakes. These two make Royal Blood look like Crass. Cashing in on the dull, numb despair which defines so many young people’s lives – it’s beyond ironic. Slaves’ £50 skinheads will grow back, but they can never take back this act.

This debut album, released on one of the biggest labels in the world, is rotten, insulting from the top down. Single Cheer Up London is a disgrace, a pseudo-ironic call to arms set to a 4/4 electro pulse, a polished version of anarchic, post-riot, disaffected youth emulated and monetised; recession, gentrification, all that shit, that grimy shit that affects people, regurgitated and recorded and aimed at an audience growing up in this shit and not really realising what’s so fucked up about it all, and being force fed this pathetic facsimile. They want your cash, they’ll do what they’re told. Box ticking liars. This album is shit, and Slaves’ borrowing of punk tropes and real problems to peddle this slickly produced hatefully-contrived gunk is despicable, boiling down the kind of heart-breaking, life-ruining issues which define Cameron’s Britain into handy, snappy, cut-out-and-keep jacket- patch slogans like Despair and Traffic. Despair and traffic. Give me a fucking break.

Fakes. Fucking fakes.