The country I love / England / You leave a taste / A bitter one
– PJ Harvey, “England”
Great Britain! / Are you sure?
– Lambrini Girls, “God’s Country”
PJ Harvey‘s acclaimed 2010 album Let England Shake is a masterpiece of melancholia. It circles around a love of a mythologized England, a nation arrogant enough to think the sun could never set on its land and then was surprised and unmoored when its colonized people rejected its death grip. Harvey’s record, spilling out through her haunting, ethereal voice, focuses on that loss of Empire from the colonizer’s perspective, asking the question: what do you do when a nation you love is lost?
To properly grieve, Freud tells us in Mourning and Melancholia(1917), you need to be able to acknowledge the loss to understand that what you loved is gone before moving forward into an unknown future. Harvey’s persona in the song “England” cannot do so, and despite the taste of bitterness, she sings of grasping for its ideal, “I cling / Undaunted / Never-failing love for you.”
The song and album wallow in melancholia, a condition of someone incapable of recognizing their loss. Instead, they narcissistically identify themselves with that which has been lost, ambivalently rejecting and desiring it without being able to let it go. Paul Gilroy’s brilliant adaptation of this type of narcissistic behavior, which he terms post-colonial melancholia, argues that these feelings have seeped into the lifeblood of the UK, where past glories are anxiously celebrated, and the traumatic injuries caused by state violence either ignored or passively excused. With the national ideal crumbling, Gilroy shows how new efforts are exerted to rebuild the facades of Empire. Margaret Thatcher may be dead, but God Save the Queen.
PJ Harvey’s England can no longer dance: as the album title states, it shakes, lumbering across the dance floor with its out-of-date clothes and old-fashioned world-view, more interested in raising a toast at the bar to war heroes than coming into contact with the other bodies on the floor.
I couldn’t stop thinking of that image of a shaking England when coming across a photo of Phoebe Lunny, singer and guitarist of the Lambrini Girls, kneeling on the floor of a small music venue, with crowds on either side of her. With her outstretched hand in the air and the other gripping a microphone, it looks as if she has parted the crowd with the sheer force of her will, revealing the old, worn-out dance floor of a venue that has seen its best days in the past. In their live shows, we know that Lunny will soon give the signal, Lily Macieira and Flora Kimberly will kick in with blistering music, and the crowd will rush together in a violent dance. The old floor will be covered over in swirling, intertwined bodies.
In my mind, Who Let the Dogs Out, the Lambrini Girl’s stomping, political, and irreverent first album, can be listened to as a response to Let England Shake, shouted over the space of 15 years. England and the world in 2025 are much different than in 2010. While PJ Harvey’s protagonists may have been stumbling around trying to hold onto a slipping image of a heroic England in the aftermath of the Gulf War, the Lambrini Girls have no time for melancholic navel-gazing.
“God’s Country”, the last song on their LP, can be heard as a rejection of Harvey’s “England”. With a simple but thick opening of drums and distorted heavy cords, the song begins with an anthem-like quality, with Lunny shouting “All Hail / God’s Country” before giving what seems to be a tired response to someone asking what they should see while visiting: “Big Ben / No. 10 / Oxford and Cambridge.” The response is lazily uninspired, as if by just stating “Big Ben” it is enough to offer it as a monument of God’s Country—so obvious that it is “great” that there is no need to think through the fact that it is counting down the time and days.
In Lunny’s voicing of the term, the monument reveals its cracks; the Lambrini Girl’s “Big Ben” is the Big Ben from National Lampoon’s European Vacation, where Clark spots it on the roundabout and yells, “Hey Kids, Big Ben!” But unable to get off the road, he keeps repeating the phrase repeatedly as night descends upon the family. The symbol is a trap that keeps you circling in space, unable to move on.
In listing those seven words, England’s symbols of history, government, and elite education are seen as empty, lacking all substance. Unlike PJ Harvey’s sad, melancholic voice singing about the polluted Thames, invoking a time when the river wasn’t toxic, for the Lambrini Girls, there is no mythic past when these symbols were great. There is no desire for what is lost because the past is a lie.
Immediately after offering her list, Lunny goes for the kill, revealing what all this emptiness is about: “Small talk about the weather / Outside detention centres.” The empty symbols, like the empty talk about the weather, go round and round like Clark on the roundabout, while real men, women, and children are trapped within detention centres that are purposely made invisible by small talk and easy clichéd symbolism.
This lyric links these two songs together, suturing 2010 and 2025 together. In Harvey’s melancholic “England”, a love oath to a nation being intruded upon by foreigners, she begins the song over a tinkering guitar with a sad, drawn-out “La-ta-da-da” that could be a sugary pop lyric but is made desolate in her long breathe release of the phrase. It conjures whiffs of memories that she is trying to recall. While she is repeating her notes, another voice comes in through the background, a foreign male voice, it’s language and words unclear, but sounding like a prayer-call. This voice is silenced, though, as the protagonist slowly sings, “I live and die / Through England / Through England”, as if repeating the phrase will make her England materialize.
But as much as that pledge seems at first to be enough to quiet those interrupting, foreign voices seeping in, they come back throughout the song, at times overwhelming the guitar and Harvey’s voice with their otherness. The song’s protagonist, though, never acknowledges the voices; she will live and die searching for the England of her imagination.
“God’s Country”, on the other hand, is clear that there is no mythic land. Throughout the song’s chorus, Lunny shouts, “Great Britain!” before responding with a sly, although angry, “Are you sure?” That rhetorical question, whose answer is clear, can be seen as one of the foreign voices interrupting Harvey’s song. It’s a queer, working-class, and feminist voice, unsettling in its forcefulness and refusal to believe in an England that is worth saving (“Democracy is never coming back,” she shouts). The band doesn’t care about tiptoeing around elders pinning for their lost love; they are stomping around, dancing together, and refusing to go away.
In “The Glorious Land“, another song from Let England Shake, Harvey also offers a call and response. At the song’s conclusion, she questions, “What is the glorious fruit of our land?” with the chorus answering, “Its fruit is deformed children”. Lambrini Girls are those fruit, “deformed” because they are unwilling to slip into a melancholic depression, reaching for a past that never was. For those holding onto the past, these “girls” are foreigners, their clear and angry voices a danger to the crown.
We are currently living in an age of governmental repackaging of white-nationalist authoritarianism as a symbol of “greatness”. Trump’s election by popular vote and similar right-wing strongmen taking their places in seats of power have seemingly exhausted much of the Left. When Trump was first elected in 2016, the Left’s response was powerful, a cacophony of anger and righteousness, expressed in solidarity marches and combative protests.
As of this writing, with Trump about to be sworn in, there is a melancholic drip settling in on much of the Left, with his election exhausting radical, uncompromising, aggressive political action. It seems a lifetime ago when we were discussing “democratic socialism” or “defunding the police”. It is not hard to imagine that monuments to white nationalists that were torn down by large crowds a few years ago will be rebuilt this year by energized bureaucrats, linking and solidifying their power through a mythologized past.
In Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia, the historian recalls the psychic injuries of many activists who saw the idea of a classless and just society crumble in front of them. These men and women who put their lives on the line for a better world were psychically wounded from the loss of their ideal. Unlike many of their fellow travelers, they survived the crash that came in the form of deportations, lengthy prison sentences, or death at the hands of mobs. Their survival, though, came at a cost, as many struggled to grieve their lost utopic vision and find new vistas to fight for. The art they made and the essays they wrote in the wake of losing their ideal floundered in their inability to let go of the past and face a depressingly bleak future.
I think that’s why it gives me comfort to look at that image of Lunny in the music venue, surrounded by others. In the photo, she is kneeling but unafraid, feeling the untapped power of the crowd who are waiting for the signal for them to come crashing onto the floor. “God’s Country” and the rest of the songs on Who Let the Dogs Out shout truths about current crises of gender, class, and racial exploitation.
But this is not a somber, frustrated album; there is a joy in its anger, an exuberant call to others to get on the floor and start dancing. “England”, “America”, and “the West” were never what they proclaimed to be; what they could become is something that still needs to be imagined. Lambrini Girls tap into these feelings of uncertainty with swagger, celebrating the marginalized who are unafraid to step into the arena and showing that in response to a melancholic longing, there is hope in offering a confident “Fuck You”. It may not be an answer, but it is a call to gather.