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 – usually seen in outlandish-looking ghillie suits, presiding over dancing crowds, occasionally wielding synths built into rotting logs – 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. “The one thing they did have was a huge duty free,” says vocalist Ankle Austin. “It was my birthday, so we sat there with a box of wine.”
“Two boxes,” 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. “Within 20 minutes, she was giving Parry tango lessons,” Austin says. “Then, 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 – watching these French students, the ballroom dancer and our bass player doing a conga.” It inspired the song ‘Dancing In Transit’ from the band’s exhilarating new album Hard Times Furious Dancing, imagining these ports – a strange hinterland, frequented by travelling musicians and artists – as a place rave culture might take on a new life. “It felt like another broken situation to dance around.”
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 band’s 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 2021’s Forest Of Your Problems. One possible reason for the delay is given in opener ‘Pay The Rent’, lamenting – over a chopped groove loaded with industrial synths – the cost-of-living-crisis and its implications for musicians. “Everyone’s feeling it, particularly in the cities – it’s affecting different scenes and different artistic communities,” Austin says. “It doesn’t stop people making music, but it makes it harder to function at a certain level.” 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 ‘Personal Responsibilities’, the vehicle remains dance music. Chestnutt nods to the historical role of protest in rave culture: “In the 90s, they started to criminalise raving – bringing in a law where you couldn’t congregate playing ‘repetitive beats,’” 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 Walker’s preface to her poetry collection Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: recounting a family member’s funeral, where she found comfort by joining mourners in “a spirited line dance”.
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 crowd’s 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 can’t avoid encountering a few static, sceptical punters. “Sometimes I’ll get half the equipment offstage and over to those people, like ‘come on then!” Austin says. “’I know you might have danced in 1990 at Shoom, and now the drugs aren’t strong enough – just get into it! Come with us on a journey.’”
There is a certain fantastical bent to Hard Times, Furious Dancing. The rise of AI is explored, in ‘Smart World’, 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. “I figured Conny’s the one who’ll break first, and go ‘No, you’ve got to go the hard way around’,” Austin says. “Eno will be more like, ‘Fuck yeah, let’s go! Let’s put our brains in a tub and post it to Mars!’”
Lead-single ‘Raoul’ – a Dadaist stomp, drawing images from the film Lost In La Mancha which documented Terry Gilliam’s disaster-strewn three decade quest to bring the Don Quixote story to the big screen – 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. “This bloke in his 60s or 70s parked himself behind us, absolutely stark naked, with a copy of Private Eye and a beer,” he says, before being joined by another carrying The Daily Mail. “It was like fucking Waiting For Godot.”
During this trip to Lanzarote, Austin also stumbled across the inspiration for ‘Where’s The Caganer?’ “In 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 artist’s made one out of a couple of buckets,” Austin says. “But no matter how big or small, each diorama always had the model of a character around the back, having a shit,” referencing the traditional Caganer figurine of a peasant defecating. “They put this figure into their nativity scenes in Northern Spain, but it’s taken off elsewhere more recently,” he says. “Probably because of hipsters like us going, ‘That’s cool!’”
There’s another fond nod to international culture in album-highlight ‘摆烂 Bai Lan’, a slang term which has gained popularity in China in recent years. Sometimes translated as “let it rot”, it means abandoning certain goals in life because – through severe competition, the pressure of social expectation or systemic failure – they have become too hard to achieve. “It’s a sense of trying to find some kind of individualism,” Austin says. “I see this as China having its ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out’ moment.”
The group finally drop the impetus to make listeners dance with ‘Closely Observed’, inspired by Jiří Menzel’s 1966 film, released in the UK as Closely Observed Trains concerning Miloš, 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 another”, Chestnutt says.
“It’s about the notion of travel,” Austin adds of the song, but notes a creeping paranoia in the lyrics and more abstract structure. “There’s a sense that there’s something that needs to be done, we don’t know what it is, but we’re being watched. We just need to prepare as best we can, and hope it doesn’t end up with too many Nazis around,” he says, before adding: “There’s a bit of a danger of that at the moment.”
Its vagueness underscores how in Hard Times, Furious Dancing – from state-of-the-nation addresses to surreal meditations on unexpected holiday sightings – Snapped Ankles don’t try to provide answers beyond ‘furious dancing’, as well as pointing to the unease that starts to creep in when the lights come back on. “We haven’t got the solutions,” Austin says, “but if you’re dancing along with us, that’s going to help.”
