Hung Like Hanratty : Welcome To The Future
(Ratty Records)
Available from Streaming | Facebook
A gonzoid romp through punk’s back pages updated for the now that deals with the mundanity of life with a tongue in cheek offensiveness and great tunes…
Welcome to the future…
No future!
But then again, even Punk was once the future.
Do they welcome the future or wish it was still the great punk wars? Possibly both! Or neither! Despite this, the future always has a nasty habit of arriving, and it’s never going to be the future that you once wanted.
No one thought punk would last forever back in 77 but here we are in the here and now, and it’s still thriving. Driven by bands like Hung Like Hanratty, 2024 punk is a rearguard underground resistance movement that is in rude (in all uses of the word) health. Sustained by endless tours and big festivals like Rebellion, it’s probably the biggest and most dysfunctional family in the UK.
Busting out of Mansfield in 2011, Hung Like Hanratty are now stars of this world, and their shows are firebrand explosive rushes of flailing limbs, leering singalongs and good times.
Welcome To The Future is yet more fast rushes of melodic punkarama full of tongue in cheek lyrical smarts and dashes of sublime seriousness and ye old trad offensiveness! The band have filtered the nineties Americana take on punk with a British twist that digs deep into the punk songbook with echoes of the early Damned and even the snarling melodic early Stranglers.
Unlike the nineties American revival, Hung Like Hanratty don’t bother with those too nice auto-tuned vocals and bring a refreshing snarl central to the proceedings that sits perfectly with the anthemic backing vocals. It’s a new hybrid! A post American takeover back to the roots punk rock riot.
It also comes with added Derek and Clive pub humour – always a prime part of the initial punk DNA. The great thing about Hung Like Hanratty is that you can’t tell when they are being funny or when they are being serious, and often when they do both at the same time, it makes you smirk as you are powered along by their ramalama rush. Making serious points about small things or winding people up with old-school punk rock offensive lyrical spitball gobs into the gutter of life, the band is ‘having a laugh and having a say’ as the old maxim goes.
The songs are super tight and far more complex than they are letting on with switching times signatures to prevent them ever tipping into straight rushes. Hung like Hanratty understand dynamics and the songs are impatient and deeply impatient constructions that never get boring – the worst crime in rock n roll.
Songwise, they are snickering cartoon cut-out punk assaults like the Toy Dolls or the D.U.M.B dumb lyrical assaults of the early Ramones or the cheap sunglasses leering of the early Damned or the down in the sewer provocation of the 1977 Stranglers filtered through their own punk lives full of cider and fizz as they laugh at how annoying the world is.
It’s the small things that annoy, the mundanity of life that makes you laugh.
None of this would work without the tunes, and every song is an 11/10 anthem that will detonate moshpits of creaky old gents. It’s the kind of stuff that creates hot, sweaty packed 3000-capacity room riots at the Rebellion Festival or meltdown in forgotten small town pubs.
So do they welcome the future? It’s hard to know whether punk now yearns for a mythical past or is still in a rush to get to the future but Hung Like Hanratty, despite their magnetic gonzoid side have the songs to make them the sound of the now and prove that punk is still the court jester pulling faces whilst telling truths at the po-faced world using bad taste as a weapon that makes a point with a daft singalong that wipes out the frustration of the day to day in fancy dress and big songs…
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