Skunk Anansie – The Painful Truth
Release Date: 23rd May 2025
Thirty years since their debut studio album, Paranoid and Sunburnt, Skunk Anansie return with their seventh long player, The Painful Truth. It’s fair to say that the last three albums haven’t achieved the commercial success of their output in the mid to late 90s, but the reception received so far for single and opening track ‘An Artist is An Artist’, suggests that this might be a different story. There are plenty of mid 90s contemporaries of the band, returning to the studio and trying to carve out their place as elder statespersons of British music, but striking a balance between satisfying old fans and new, is a difficult trick to master. Where some bands rely heavily on nostalgia, and will be happy to trot out more of their winning formula, others have adapted their sound and stage persona to reflect their advanced years; after all, nobody wants to see a fifty something leap off a speaker stack and give themselves an injury, it’s unedifying. But Skunk Anansie are different, they always were. The band never sat comfortably alongside their mid-90s contemporaries, and they could certainly never have been classed as Britpop, despite appearing on the same compilations and era defining TV shows.
Skin’s lyrics make it clear, right from the outset, that they are not concerned with making art for others, they won’t be “changing up like British weather” to fit in with the whims of the industry, but at the same time, they “didn’t hang around to be [their] own echo”, they have evolved. Stylistically, there is definitely an evolution, if not necessarily a revolution. This is a more reflective band, and nowhere near the aggression levels of, for argument’s sake, 1996’s Stoosh, but don’t be fooled by that, they still mean business. Whilst the opening track hits the listener like a steam train, the album opens up to allow space to breathe, and even the a cappella introduction to the beautifully wistful ‘Lost and Found’ seems perfectly at home here. The, at once, menacing and euphoric synths in ‘Animal’ make it a real tour de force of a song, this is Skunk Anansie in their pomp, and demands to be heard. There’s often an autobiographical feel to The Painful Truth, and nowhere else is this more evident than in ‘Shame’; it’s a showcase of just how powerful and on point, Skin’s vocals are. The lyrics sing of pain, and are delivered with conviction, but the sound of the song grows into an ethereal sound bath of loveliness.
Skunk Anansie have matured, their sound still has the energy and edge of the music from earlier in their career, but it’s more rounded, more surprising. David Sitek’s production has allowed the band this space to develop, to create this engaging and tantalising mishmash quilt of styles and genres. It is a wonderful thing, and perhaps the band’s best work to date.