The Full Story
About Serious
Serious is another 16-track odyssey maintaining and amplifying the critical, existential plea for more humanity that forms the intellectual basis of all Madadkin's work. Rooted in blues, but branching out into rock, jazz, and avant-garde experimentations, this album is surgical rather than smooth in its analysis of our contemporary not-yet human condition.
The title is a cry for action. Beginning with a confession: "We Left the Lights On" unfolding unto the desperate cry of "Enough Shit" Madadkin takes us on another musical journey through ever more distorted and distorting kaleidoscope of styles reflecting this world in freefall. Another prophetic howl from the edge of a civilisation in decadent collapse.
Serious about CLIMATE CHANGE: We Left the Lights On; Go to the River; Hello. Mr Ostrich Man; The Swarm Paradox
Serious about Climate Change gathers the pieces that speak to the planet’s accelerating crisis and our tangled, often contradictory responses to it. We Left the Lights On sets the scene with a gentle but unsettling metaphor: an entire civilisation dozing through its own emergency, comforted by familiar routines while the damage mounts outside. Go to the River breaks from the album’s song structure altogether, using a TV news-reader’s voice to report on climate change in Europe. Its cool, measured delivery contrasts sharply with the enormity of what’s being described — a reminder of how calmly catastrophe can be narrated when we’ve grown used to it. Hello, Mr Ostrich Man shifts into satire, confronting denial with sharp humour. A snippet of a political leader denying climate change at the UN adds a chilling, real-world edge to the absurdity. The Swarm Paradox returns here with a deepened meaning: it explores the demographic overload suffocating the planet while acknowledging the essential contradiction — that only a mobilised collective, the “swarm” itself, can force the revolutionary changes needed to save it.
Together, these tracks form one of the album’s most urgent thematic threads: a portrait of a world heating, shrinking, and spiralling toward crisis while humanity oscillates between denial, confusion, and the faint possibility of collective awakening.
Serious about OUR INCAPACITY TO IMPROVE OURSELVES: Why do we never learn?; Pavane for Peace
Serious about Our Incapacity to Improve Ourselves is the album’s most introspective corner — a quiet reckoning with the patterns we repeat and the lessons we seem unable to absorb. Why Do We Never Learn? appears here in its more intimate form, an acoustic blues meditation that strips everything back to voice and guitar. The simplicity exposes the frustration at its core: humanity’s tendency to circle the same mistakes, generation after generation. In contrast, Pavane for Peace offers no words at all — a slow, cool-jazz instrumental that floats like a wistful question. Its spaciousness suggests the peace we long for but rarely manage to build, a fragile hope suspended between melancholy and possibility.
Together, these two pieces create a reflective pause in the album’s tapestry: a moment to consider not just the world’s failures, but our own.
Serious about the COLLAPSE OF CIVILISATION: Pull up the Floor; Hymn For Europe Live From Butlins
Serious about the Collapse of Civilisation gathers the album’s starkest meditations — pieces that look beyond crisis to the possibility of societal breakdown and the fragile beauty that might remain in the ruins. Pull Up the Floor is a stark, unsettling track that imagines what happens when the foundations finally give way: the political, economic, and cultural structures we depend on suddenly exposed as temporary scaffolding. Its mood is claustrophobic and disoriented, echoing the sensation of a world slipping out from beneath our feet. Hymn for Europe — Live from Butlins responds with a strange, haunting counterpoint: a minimalist organ rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony paired with a recital of Schiller’s poem. Stripped of orchestral grandeur, the piece feels both fragile and defiant, echoing the Enlightenment ideals of unity, dignity, and fraternity from within a setting that suggests decline, nostalgia, and the last flickers of a fading civilisation.
Together, these tracks form a reflection on civilisation as a precarious dream — one that may be collapsing, yet still humming with the distant hope that humanity can rediscover what binds it together.
Serious about ALIENATION & EXPLOITATION: Cultural Capitalism; Dreams That Turned to Foam; Why Do We Never Learn?; All The World's A Stage; Stage Fright; Paint Away the Grey
Serious about Alienation & Exploitation gathers the album’s most socially charged pieces — songs circling the quiet pressures and absurdities of modern life. Why Do We Never Learn? opens the set with a lament: history repeats itself, cycles of exploitation persist, and we continue to stumble into the same traps. Cultural Capitalism is a wry look at how we barter our identities for survival, juggling the performances demanded by work, image, and ambition. Dreams That Turned to Foam follows the drifting life of the digital-age worker, caught between economic precarity and the fantasy of escape. In All The World’s a Stage the camera turns inward, exploring the masks we wear and the fear of being truly seen. That fear becomes intimate in Stage Fright, a song about vulnerability, expectation, and the tremor beneath every attempt to step forward. Paint Away the Grey, a quieter but defiant piece — a call to reclaim colour, agency, and imagination in a system that thrives on draining them away.
Together, these tracks set a contemplative, critical, and deeply human tone for Serious — an album that listens closely to the cracks in contemporary life.
Serious about OUR NEED FOR REVOLUTION: The Clock is Ticking; The Swarm Paradox; My Golgotha; Enough Shit
Serious about Our Need for Revolution gathers the album’s most urgent and confrontational pieces — songs that look unflinchingly at the systems we live under and the pressure building beneath them. The Clock Is Ticking sets the pace with a sense of accelerating crisis: social, ecological, moral. It’s a reminder that time is no longer something we can take for granted. The Swarm Paradox dives into the collective contradictions of society — how in a demographically choking society vast groups can act mindlessly, even destructively, while each individual feels powerless to change the whole. My Golgotha turns that critique inward, exploring personal sacrifice and the burdens we carry in a world that demands both conformity and redemption, yet offers neither. The block culminates with Enough Shit, a raw, cathartic outburst against injustice and complacency; a refusal to accept the unacceptable any longer.
Though these tracks appear throughout the album’s chronology, together they form a thematic backbone: a meditation on pressure, awakening, and the necessity — perhaps inevitability — of revolutionary change.