Exploding Plastic Inevitable: Sod in Heaven by MPTL Microplastics

In the beginning, there was This Heat. Charles Hayward and co traversed the disused pie factories and damp warehouses that suffused South London, and the resultant music was something seriously challenging: dread-laden, perversely fun, janky, dancey, genre-collapsing. Some believed it encompassed post-punk.

I’m not sure if Hayward cast a spell on South London, but, if you haven’t been in a 50-year-long hibernation, you might have noticed that the badlands below the Thames have now long been the reactor core for some of the UK’s most interesting guitar music. Even young bands from further afield, like Crewe’s University, Manchester’s Westside Cowboy or Leeds’ Normal Village are finding a spiritual home on its gig circuit. Groups come in the sixes, eights, and sevens, wielding mandolins and music stands. Elders weep. Children cheer. Goldsmiths graduates sell you middling beer. Sound guys take to the streets. Every so often, though, you stumble across a band that sticks with you. 

Hailing from Deptford, South London, MPTL (‘My Pussy Tastes Like’) Microplastics describe themselves as an “8 person industrial folk collective playing chronoplastic ballads of the future / folk music for a polymer people / stiob-eulogies arranged in the canon of the desecrated harp / crisis songs for the exploding (micro)plastic inevitable” (or 8PIFCPCBOTF / FMFAPP / S-EAITCOTDH / CSFTE(M)PI, for short). They are also one of those great acts you might stumble upon. And their music is as chaotic and sidewinding as their logline. They rip This Heat drumbeats (as told to tQ), play 26-minute long noise-folk set enders, and can often be found cramming as many people and instruments as they can onto stages far too small.

With a healthy word-of-mouth buzz, a slew of legendary live shows, and a percussionist who seems to prefer drumming on beer kegs than bongos, their debut album, Sod In Heaven, seeks to bottle a raucous, unpredictable and beguiling live band into an LP. The result is a satisfying record that runs the tricky gamut between musical freedom and maturity. Tracks capture the capricious mania of a MPTLM live show, with just the right amount to be desired. Noise rock, post-punk, outsider music and krautrock crash at the ship’s bough. A series of Windmill scene adjacent soupçons are palpable, like the sprechgesang that clips the mix on the album’s title track, or the Fall adjacent ‘Sex Pol’, which sees crepuscular woodwind scales reach up like rickety treefingers and prod at a grimly repetitive baseline. 

But there’s something else to them. It’s hard to put your finger on who or what MPTL Microplastics really sound like, for Sod In Heaven is an album that feels just as much an act of homage to the post-punk and experimental scenes that birthed it as it does a gesture towards their evolution. It is a hauntological hairball of earnest melody, grassy chords and dark ages drones – a palimpsest of fractured beauty, romance and epic, edges frayed and burnt, margins artfully doodled in. In this way, their music feels just as much at home amongst Britain’s outsider art, psychedelic art and prog communities as it does any post-punk scene. 

The band’s debut single (perhaps the album’s standout track) ‘Plastic Princess’ encapsulates this best. Like their mammoth membership, tracks into the realm of seven or eight minutes and beyond are commonplace on this record, and this one is no exception. Growling feedback and drone seep in as the track begins, before petering out into something like the second coming of Clive Palmer’s crusading medievalism with COB. Backed by solo guitar and uncanny reverb, two voices ring out through the fog. They might be keening – that is until serpentine violin, marching drums and roomy guitar stabs enter, recontextualising lament into exuberance. As the two voices grow, they often dip slightly off-kilter – perhaps even off-key – against the song’s chord changes (a feature of other tracks like ‘Wound Nurse’), and I am reminded of the uncannily beautiful music of Merseyside songwriter Jimmy Campbell, or even Robert Wyatt. The chord progression is stretched apart and battered until, finally, all fades back into groggy fog.  

It’s this ability, to straddle something that sounds both radically forward – and really quite weird – with the sounds of influences both old and new, that makes Sod In Heaven such a fascinating album. As of late, it seems as if the Windmill scene might be tying itself in a knot when many bands, like The Orchestra (For Now), are playing (and releasing) music that doesn’t sound like a radical progression from the sounds that dominated post-punk scenes at the end of the 2010s. Their instrumentation and scale might not be radically different from a group like The Orchestra (For Now), or Black Country, New Road, for that matter, but it’s MPTL’s approach to performing live with these instruments that sets them apart. Red Stripe cans, tables – even a playable pole (“The Pole”) – come out, as might masks and contorted dance moves, convulsed by the music’s harebrained turns.

This is, in part, something that sounds effective both live and in the studio – no doubt thanks to the production, engineering and mastering work from Armando Gonzalez Sosto and band member Dan Powley. While production deftly handles the density of such a packed lineup, there’s a roughness present that refuses to sand down the band’s edges – often most apparent through Joey Hollis and Amelia Blackwell’s inviting vocals. Instruments bleed into one another, rhythms buckle and recover, and the sense of collective momentum is preserved rather than tidied away. 

Sod In Heaven succeeds because it understands lineage without being trapped within it. MPTL Microplastics treat post-punk not as a scene to be replicated but as a condition. Their music reaches backwards into post-punk, folk, prog and outsider traditions, metabolising those histories into something truly forward-reaching. Songs are unafraid to lapse into sagas, documenting all of England’s residual weirdness, and perhaps providing a model through which ideas of folk, national identity and post-punk may be able to interact, may be able to share in their scrappy, artful ethos. If South London truly is a reactor core, MPTL Microplastics are proof that it hasn’t yet cooled since Hayward’s day. Instead, it has mutated.