Modern popular culture is a tourist trap. It seduces us to walk the easy path, to embrace the safely recognisable and to gorge on the unchallenging, endless, streams of homogenised mass-market pulp. See the sights, hear the sounds and always take the predefined route until those streams become stagnant pools and nothing means anything anymore.
The Prodigy has never taken the lazy tourist route. Since their inception in the heady rave days of the UK’s last truly oppositional subculture, they’ve eschewed the obvious and followed the path less trodden. Not for them rehash after reboot of their biggest hits. Not for them the bandwagon jumping, sales chasing genre shifts of so many of their contemporaries either. Each and every turn in their story has been one of determined independence. And now, they are back with a brand new album, called “No Tourists”!
No Tourists is the band’s seventh studio album. A ten-track attack of cut and destroy euphoria that screams ‘we are The Prodigy, champions of London’, it is unashamedly forged from the sounds that they’ve made their own. The cacophony of chaos, the structure destroying b-lines, the sensory attacking beats – the foundations of The Prodigy sound. It’s an album of contorted and violent production that sees Liam Howlett once again turning expectations inside out. From the opening jackhammer impact of first single ‘Need Some 1’ to the closing 303 acid house thunder of ‘Give Me a Signal’, No Tourists takes you on a journey through the twisted, party-hard psych of a band that has resolutely followed their own route through the underbelly of popular culture since day one. It’s every inch a Prodigy record and it’s their most direct, concise and pure statement yet.
Check out the album below and get ready to be amazed!