Album review: Hot Milk – Corporation P.O.P

While it’s mighty tough to make a living from music these days, British rock remains an embarrassment of riches. A key player, especially after this album, are Mancunians Hot Milk. Like the best things in life, Corporation P.O.P needs your time, such is its diversity of sound, its deviation from anthem to atmosphere, its sheer refusal to stay still.

Opener (How Do I) Make The Devil Fall Asleep marches in like Led Zeppelin, far from the punky rock you’d expect, but soon gets hurled back and forth through the joint lead vocals of Han Mee and Jim Shaw. Expect bigger sounds and broader vision from a band moving from jog to sprint. Insubordinate Ingerland is their most immediately singable, punk metal shout-out, mating a feast of a sing-along with lyrics that satirise what it is to be English today. The American Machine is compelling for similar reasons, Han offering prescient warnings of ‘a kiss and a hug and an F-15’.

There are signs of the band’s enlarging scope everywhere. Swallow This introduces itself via electronics familiar to NIN or Starset fans, before hitting hard with rough-as-sandpaper riffs and throat-busting vocals from Han. Chase The Dragon is a cleverly constructed song, the type of thing the band might not have seen through in earlier years, while 90 Seconds To Midnight, revealed a few months ago via a brilliant video featuring comedian Frank Skinner, is the type of caffeine bomb you’d expect from Wildhearts genius Ginger.

While Hot Milk’s free-thinking vigour stems from and is directed at their own generation, their songwriting and production simply invites comparison with the best. Warehouse Salvation, all electro backing and robotic vocals, wants to turn into a rave but doesn’t, while Payment Of Pain rises dramatically from a largely synthesised background. It’ll be too much for some, but given time you realise it’s not just a step forward but a serious attempt at hyperspace hopping.

Creative British acts embracing serious topics in a blaze of different sounds are to be cherished. Right now Hot Milk are coming to the boil.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Bring Me The Horizon, VUKOVI, You Me At Six

Corporation P.O.P is released on June 27 via Music For Nations

Read this next:

• Hot Milk’s Han Mee: The 10 songs that changed my life
• Drum’n’bass, stripteases and oranges: Life on the road with Hot Milk
• Hot Milk: “This is a family that we’re building. I genuinely feel connected to our fans”