The Full Story
About It's Raining in Greenland
It's Raining in Greenland concludes MADADKIN's Postpandemic trilogy with an album that is at once political, philosophical, absurd and deeply personal. If the pandemic initially appeared to offer humanity an opportunity to rethink its priorities, this collection emerges from the growing realisation that the opportunity may have been missed. The world has resumed its old habits, and in many respects become more fragmented, anxious and unstable than before.
Yet this is not an album of despair.
Moving between rock ballads, jazz experiments, spoken-word collages and surreal soundscapes, It's Raining in Greenland explores what remains when easy optimism has faded. Corruption, war, climate change, consumerism and social alienation all come under scrutiny, but beneath these themes lies a deeper question: why does awareness so rarely lead to transformation?
Throughout the album, voices drift in and out of focus like distant radio transmissions. Dreams mingle with political commentary. Hope competes with disappointment. Songs of exhaustion stand beside calls for action. Personal memories collide with historical warnings and philosophical reflections. Reality itself begins to feel uncertain, shaped as much by stories, beliefs and collective fictions as by material events.
Musically, the album represents a significant expansion of MADADKIN's experimental language. Traditional songwriting sits alongside documentary samples, found voices, improvised structures and abstract sound collages. Tracks such as In the End and The Pit and the Pyramid push beyond the conventional boundaries of song, exploring the possibility that meaning can emerge from fragments, echoes and unexpected juxtapositions.
Yet for all its complexity, the album remains grounded in recognisably human concerns. Beneath the environmental warnings, political frustrations and philosophical questions lies a continuing search for purpose, connection and authenticity. The result is a work that oscillates constantly between irony and sincerity, satire and hope, nightmare and possibility.
If The Rapture looked outward towards myth and apocalypse, It's Raining in Greenland turns inward towards consciousness itself. It asks not only what kind of world we have created, but what kind of beings we have become—and whether we can still imagine becoming something better.
Warnings and Disillusionment:
You're Killing It All; Why Are We So Ashamed?; It's Raining in Greenland; The War Machine; Money Ain't Real
The opening movement of It's Raining in Greenland is shaped by a growing sense of disillusionment. Emerging from the optimism that briefly accompanied the end of the pandemic, these songs confront the possibility that humanity may have learned very little from the crises it has endured. Environmental warnings become harder to ignore, political corruption appears increasingly normalised, economic systems seem detached from human wellbeing, and the machinery of conflict continues to gather momentum.
Yet these songs are not merely protest songs. Beneath their political and social concerns lies a deeper frustration: the realisation that awareness alone does not produce change. We know more than ever before, but knowledge has not made us wiser. The warnings are visible. The evidence is overwhelming. The signal is clear. Still, the old habits persist.
Across these tracks, optimism slowly gives way to unease. The ecological absurdity of It's Raining in Greenland, the moral embarrassment of Why Are We So Ashamed?, the geopolitical lament of The War Machine and the dark economic nightmare of Money Ain't Real all circle around the same troubling insight. The greatest threat may not be ignorance but our remarkable ability to continue behaving as though nothing has changed.
Musically, the section moves between rock, jazz, satire and lament, reflecting a world that often appears both ridiculous and tragic at the same time. Humour remains present, but it is increasingly coloured by exhaustion and disbelief. What emerges is not a call to despair, but a portrait of a civilisation struggling to confront the consequences of its own behaviour.
The warnings have been delivered. The question is whether anyone is still listening.
Dreams, Consciousness and the Search for Meaning:
Yesterday in a Dream; Stripped
After confronting corruption, ecological crisis, war and social failure, It's Raining in Greenland turns inward. The focus shifts from the external world to the inner landscape of dreams, memory, consciousness and human purpose. If the opening songs ask what has gone wrong, these songs ask how we continue living with that knowledge.
In Yesterday in a Dream, the boundaries between life and death, self and world, begin to dissolve. A child's grief becomes the starting point for a meditation on consciousness itself. Dreams are presented not merely as private experiences but as places where reality reflects upon itself. The song introduces themes that would later become increasingly important within the broader philosophical world surrounding MADADKIN: the possibility that consciousness extends beyond the material and that meaning may be found in places modern culture rarely encourages us to look.
Stripped continues this exploration from a more personal perspective. The mood is weary, reflective and deeply human. Exhaustion replaces certainty. The promises of society, success and progress feel increasingly hollow, yet the song refuses to surrender to despair. Instead, it searches for reasons to continue. Beneath the melancholy lies a quiet affirmation that human worth cannot be measured by external systems alone.
Together these songs form the emotional centre of the album. They acknowledge loss, disappointment and uncertainty while refusing to reduce existence to them. In a world that often appears increasingly fragmented and chaotic, they suggest that meaning may begin not through grand solutions but through self-reflection, honesty and the courage to ask deeper questions.
The search for a better world therefore becomes inseparable from the search for a better understanding of ourselves.
Hope, Resistance and Human Agency:
Slam on the Engine; The Rumour; What I Want; Please Mr Sandman
Having confronted political failure, ecological crisis and social disillusionment, the album reaches a crossroads. These songs refuse to accept despair as a final destination. The world may be troubled, but surrender remains a choice. The question is no longer what has gone wrong, but what can still be done.
Slam on the Engine is the album's most direct call to action. Urgent, energetic and unapologetically idealistic, it rejects passivity and encourages collective engagement. The song recognises the scale of the challenges ahead while insisting that meaningful change remains possible if people are willing to act together. Hope here is not an emotion but a decision.
The Rumour develops this theme further. Hope arrives not as certainty but as a whisper travelling beneath the surface of society. Change first appears as a possibility, then as an idea, and finally as a growing conviction. The song suggests that political transformation begins when despair is replaced by belief that a different future can be created.
What I Want reduces this impulse to its simplest form. Amid the album's complexity, it offers an almost childlike declaration of intent. The desire is neither power nor wealth but simply the ability to hope, to shine and to remain mentally free. Its absurd simplicity conceals a serious insight: genuine aspirations are often far less complicated than the systems that frustrate them.
Please Mr Sandman closes the section by blurring the boundary between dream and reality. The world described throughout the album increasingly resembles a nightmare from which society struggles to awaken. Yet beneath the song's weariness lies a yearning for renewal. The impossible reversals it imagines are not presented as practical solutions but as expressions of a deeper desire to begin again and rediscover a more humane way of living.
Together these songs form the album's most hopeful movement. Their optimism is cautious and often uncertain, but it remains genuine. Against the forces of cynicism, resignation and despair, they defend the possibility that human beings can still choose a different path. The future may be unclear, but the engine has not yet stopped running.
Fragments, Voices & Experiments:
In the End; The Pit and the Pyramid
At the heart of It's Raining in Greenland lies a pair of tracks that move beyond conventional songwriting and into more experimental territory. Here, songs become collages, voices become fragments of memory, and meaning emerges through unexpected juxtapositions rather than straightforward narrative. The result is some of the album's most challenging, ambitious and artistically distinctive material.
In the End begins as a free-form jazz experiment before gradually revealing itself as something closer to a sonic documentary. Fragments of speeches concerning climate change drift through the music like transmissions from another time. Contemporary warnings are placed alongside older voices, creating the unsettling impression that humanity has been repeating the same conversation for generations. The track refuses a conventional conclusion, ending in a manner that feels deliberately incomplete, as though the story itself remains unresolved.
The Pit and the Pyramid pushes this approach much further. Philosophy, poetry, absurd humour, mythology and personal reflection collide within a constantly shifting landscape of sounds and voices. Texts from Sylvia Plath sit alongside philosophical dialogue, dreamlike imagery and recurring expressions of shame and uncertainty. The piece resists easy interpretation, inviting the listener to navigate a labyrinth of symbols, memories and associations. Rather than presenting a fixed argument, it explores the possibility that understanding emerges through the interaction of fragments.
Together these works represent the album's most radical artistic gesture. They abandon the expectation that songs must proceed in a linear fashion or deliver clear conclusions. Instead, they embrace ambiguity, contradiction and discovery. Political concerns become inseparable from psychological ones. Public voices merge with private reflections. The boundary between thought, memory, dream and reality begins to dissolve.
If the rest of the album asks how we should respond to a troubled world, these pieces ask a deeper question: how do we construct meaning in the first place? Their answer is neither simple nor definitive. Meaning is not discovered fully formed. It is assembled, piece by piece, from the fragments we inherit, remember and imagine.
Epilogue: Happy Stories
After the warnings, the dreams, the hopes, the experiments and the philosophical detours, It's Raining in Greenland concludes with a story.
Ben wants to be a writer. Megan wants to draw. Life intervenes, dreams are abandoned and the years quietly pass. Then along comes Rusty, a Labrador in need of help, and suddenly friendship, creativity and love all find their way back into the picture.
On the surface, Happy Stories is the album's simplest song. It offers everything one might expect from a traditional happy ending: lost friends reunited, artistic ambitions revived and a faithful dog helping to bring it all together. After so much uncertainty, the conclusion appears reassuringly straightforward.
Yet the song's simplicity raises its own questions. Why do we seek happy endings? Why do stories so often feel obliged to provide them? Is happiness something we discover, or something we construct? The repeated refrain insists that happy stories have happy endings, but the listener is left to decide how literally this should be understood.
Perhaps the song is sincere. Perhaps it is ironic. Perhaps it is both.
Either way, the album closes not with a warning or a prophecy, but with a tale. After everything that has come before, that may be exactly what we need.
And, of course, there is a Labrador.
