Mingled smoke and fog drift over the blackened scene of a brutal battle. Amidst the carnage, the billowing craters, and the groans of the wounded, a group of silhouetted figures stagger forth: men who are bloodied and maimed yet still defiant, still just about devoted to a long-lost cause as they roam ever onwards, through visions of pain to the end of the night…
Fat White Family are back! The cult south-London band’s long-gestated fourth album, "Forgiveness Is Yours" has, like everything they’ve done but more so, pushed them to the limits not only of their creative talent but of their health, their sanity, and their very existence. The external enemies have melted away — perhaps they were hallucinations all along. The Fat Whites’ dirty war was only ever with themselves — a war for hearts and minds, their own as much as anyone’s. A war whose primary objective, it turns out, was survival.
Who would have predicted, when Fat White Family first hurled themselves at the music scene in a nihilistic art jihad a decade ago, that, in 2024, the band would not only still be here, but putting out the most sophisticated, vital and flamboyant music of their career? Right from their earliest days, Fat White Family — fronted by singer Lias Saoudi, with the since-departed Saul Adamczewski behind him — instinctively grasped the long-neglected power of myth in rock’n’roll, the necessity of giving people something (or nothing) to believe in. In a drab monoculture of play-it-safe pop careerists, Fat White Family carried the sacred flame. A band with the power to inspire, they were vehemently punk not in sound but in spirit, and their live shows were the stuff of urban legend — fervid whispers told of raw shamanic force, unbridled ferocity, shocking acts of transgression and self-abasement.
