Real Lies’ new album ‘WE WILL ANNIHILATE OUR ENEMIES’ will arrive on April 16th 2025 via Tonal. The album is about taking the hand of someone you love intensely and running
headlong into the chaos and noise and grinding forces that dominate modern life. It follows gilded 2024 collaborations with Mall Grab, Kettama and Drain Gang’s YEAR0001 label.
Lyricist Kevin Lee Kharas and producer Patrick King created the record in their studio, hidden away under a railway bridge somewhere in London’s Zone 3. Three pictures stared down at them from the walls throughout, including an image of a young Sasha Shulgin in the relief print style of Che Guevara t-shirts sold at Camden Market, and a photo of an orbiter fairground ride in flight, taken sometime in the early 2000s. Kharas’ lyrical inspiration comes when he steps away from the tsunami of data flooding his consciousness and paces London’s rain-soaked streets late at night.
“I wanted the songs on WWAOE to confront modern reality head-on, unflinching,” he
explains. “I didn’t want to whine about a lost past. I didn’t want nostalgia. I wanted to learn to love the modern world, with all its horrors and futility.”
After a teenhood spent playing in hardcore bands, the duo found ecstasy at a squat party for the first time, and moved to London. Since then, they’ve made music about finding romance and fun when the moon is up, becoming a cult act in the process. While their second album ‘Lad Ash’ (2022) was written during lockdown, and saw the group turn inside themselves, to their memories and formative teenage traumas, for inspiration, ‘WE WILL ANNIHILATE OUR ENEMIES’ is a very different record, one written in the present tense that takes aim rather than turns away.
It mythologises lost friends, exalts the natural world, explores patriotism as a force for
positivity rather than jingoism, and identifies cocaine as an unctuous leveller in a class-
conflicted society. There is a love story steeped in local history, a song dedicated to the
profound cultural impact wrought by Shulgin, and, with the help of actress Jessica Barden
(Dune: Prophecy/The End of the F***ing World), a tender and defiant closing duet about
coming to terms with reality after dreams hit their sell-by date - “With a daughter we called England / in a town we named despair.”
The album is the start of a new chapter for Real Lies, whose misfortunes have conversely
cemented their status as one of the UK’s most enduring electronic acts. A six-figure record
deal vetoed at the last minute, plunging them into years of existential inertia. A world tour
with Pet Shop Boys that never happened because their dancers needed too much time to
get changed between songs. A global pandemic that broke out just as they were revving up to release their second album.
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