In the winter of 2019, Snapped Ankles were returning from a show in France when a blizzard hit the UK. The anonymous East London electronic outfit โ usually seen in outlandish-looking ghillie suits, presiding over dancing crowds, occasionally wielding synths built into rotting logs โ found themselves stranded in the departure lounge on the French end of the Eurotunnel, with limited food and a 12 hour wait ahead of them. โThe one thing they did have was a huge duty free,โ says vocalist Ankle Austin. โIt was my birthday, so we sat there with a box of wine.โ
โTwo boxes,โ synth player Ankle Chestnutt corrects him.
During the spontaneous birthday party, bassist Ankle Parry struck up conversation with a 60-year-old ballroom dancer, who was returning from a European competition with her handsome young Italian dancing partner. โWithin 20 minutes, she was giving Parry tango lessons,โ Austin says. โThen, a group of French students joined in with a boom box. Time went sort of wonky after that, but within an hour the security guards were there โ watching these French students, the ballroom dancer and our bass player doing a conga.โ It inspired the song โDancing In Transitโ from the bandโs exhilarating new album Hard Times Furious Dancing, imagining these ports โ a strange hinterland, frequented by travelling musicians and artists โ as a place rave culture might take on a new life. โIt felt like another broken situation to dance around.โ
The main thrust of the new LP concerns how dancing can be a vehicle for sharing frustrations; hopefully then either an inspiration to tackle these frustrations or a means of finding respite from them. The bandโs credentials go back beyond their 2017 debut album Come Play The Trees, to plying their Can-via-LCD Soundsystem-via-DEVO dance music at London warehouse parties as early as 2011. Claiming to be descended from trees… building synths by affixing piezo triggers to old tree branches… they have always had one major root planted in the loam of performance art and another the other in the tradition of surreal humour. On this album both of these aspects to the group feel equally weighted producing a rebooted sound which is sometimes poignant, sometimes weird, but always riotously fun.
It comes four years on from 2021โs Forest Of Your Problems. One possible reason for the delay is given in opener โPay The Rentโ, lamenting โ over a chopped groove loaded with industrial synths โ the cost-of-living-crisis and its implications for musicians. โEveryoneโs feeling it, particularly in the cities โ itโs affecting different scenes and different artistic communities,โ Austin says. โIt doesnโt stop people making music, but it makes it harder to function at a certain level.โ While the band could previously amass recording funds through international touring and merch sales, rising costs have changed the game. Their 2022 North American tour put them in a financial hole so deep, Chestnutt says, they are still climbing out of it in 2025.
Whether their political messaging is dealing with economic pressures, or skewering corporate negligence in โPersonal Responsibilitiesโ, the vehicle remains dance music. Chestnutt nods to the historical role of protest in rave culture: โIn the 90s, they started to criminalise raving โ bringing in a law where you couldnโt congregate playing โrepetitive beats,โโ he says, referencing the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. For the band though, this idea of dance music as protest music seems secondary to the idea of dance music as escapism. The title is drawn from Alice Walkerโs preface to her poetry collection Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: recounting a family memberโs funeral, where she found comfort by joining mourners in โa spirited line danceโ.
Snapped Ankles shows don’t tend to be funereal in any respect however. I caught them at the 100 Club in London just before the holidays, and they remain brilliantly intense: the crowdโs frenzied grooving sometimes breaking into moshing and crowd-surfing. It struck me at the time that they may, albeit quietly, have helped pave the way for more recent electronic-punk crossovers like SCALER and Fat Dog: if only in reassuring indie promoters through the 2010s of the appetite for this kind of show. For all their skill in whipping up audiences though, they canโt avoid encountering a few static, sceptical punters. โSometimes Iโll get half the equipment offstage and over to those people, like โcome on then!โ Austin says. โโI know you might have danced in 1990 at Shoom, and now the drugs arenโt strong enough โ just get into it! Come with us on a journey.โโ
There is a certain fantastical bent to Hard Times, Furious Dancing. The rise of AI is explored, in โSmart Worldโ, via an imagined conversation between Brian Eno and the late Conny Plank. While both embraced technologies which might once have been perceived as removing the human from the musical equation, in this conversation Eno is pro-AI (which tracks) and Plank is the sceptic. โI figured Connyโs the one whoโll break first, and go โNo, youโve got to go the hard way around’,โ Austin says. โEno will be more like, โFuck yeah, letโs go! Letโs put our brains in a tub and post it to Mars!โโ
Lead-single โRaoulโ โ a Dadaist stomp, drawing images from the film Lost In La Mancha which documented Terry Gilliamโs disaster-strewn three decade quest to bring the Don Quixote story to the big screen โ also centres on a conversation Austin overheard. This time it was between a pair of Brits abroad, who Austin encountered with his partner on a Lanzarote beach. โThis bloke in his 60s or 70s parked himself behind us, absolutely stark naked, with a copy of Private Eye and a beer,โ he says, before being joined by another carrying The Daily Mail. โIt was like fucking Waiting For Godot.โ
During this trip to Lanzarote, Austin also stumbled across the inspiration for โWhereโs The Caganer?โ โIn one of the places we visited, they had Spanish nativity dioramas. Some were so big that they would take up an entire village square. Walking onto one of these plazas is like walking onto a theatre set. But some of the other dioramas you come across seem more like an outsider artistโs made one out of a couple of buckets,โ Austin says. โBut no matter how big or small, each diorama always had the model of a character around the back, having a shit,โ referencing the traditional Caganer figurine of a peasant defecating. โThey put this figure into their nativity scenes in Northern Spain, but itโs taken off elsewhere more recently,โ he says. โProbably because of hipsters like us going, โThatโs cool!โโ
Thereโs another fond nod to international culture in album-highlight โๆ็ Bai Lanโ, a slang term which has gained popularity in China in recent years. Sometimes translated as โlet it rotโ, it means abandoning certain goals in life because โ through severe competition, the pressure of social expectation or systemic failure โ they have become too hard to achieve. โItโs a sense of trying to find some kind of individualism,โ Austin says. โI see this as China having its โTurn On, Tune In, Drop Outโ moment.โ
The group finally drop the impetus to make listeners dance with โClosely Observedโ, inspired by Jiลรญ Menzel’s 1966 film, released in the UK as Closely Observed Trains concerning Miloลก, a Czech train station worker during World War II. Where the album otherwise drives its muscular polyrhythms through house music adjacent peaks and valleys, this is built around a shuffling 6/8 rhythm designed to evoke the chugging motion of a train, and borrows from the logic of both rock and dance music. “This song just morphs from one thing to anotherโ, Chestnutt says.
โItโs about the notion of travel,โ Austin adds of the song, but notes a creeping paranoia in the lyrics and more abstract structure. โThereโs a sense that thereโs something that needs to be done, we donโt know what it is, but weโre being watched. We just need to prepare as best we can, and hope it doesnโt end up with too many Nazis around,โ he says, before adding: โThere’s a bit of a danger of that at the moment.โ
Its vagueness underscores how in Hard Times, Furious Dancing โ from state-of-the-nation addresses to surreal meditations on unexpected holiday sightings โ Snapped Ankles donโt try to provide answers beyond โfurious dancingโ, as well as pointing to the unease that starts to creep in when the lights come back on. โWe havenโt got the solutions,โ Austin says, โbut if youโre dancing along with us, thatโs going to help.โ
