Bad Breeding: Contempt 12"

It follows 2022s ‘Human Capital’ which mercilessly attacked Conservative meritocracy and the exploitative forces of late capitalism. ‘Contempt’ ups the ante yet again and explores the continued effects that austerity has had on the working public and specifically capital’s destruction of the planet and its inhabitants. It’s released with multiple essays in an accompanying zine, one that follows environmental and humanitarian journalist Aidan Frere-Smith and another that tells the story of a homelessness crisis in a city full of unused housing. Utilizing a mix of propulsive rhythm and furious, explosive guitars to maximum effect, Bad Breeding have weaponised their anger in the fight for survival; “Because these days are ours to take / Seize them with union, love and rage”.

Christopher Dodd explains “Capital and its bourgeois foot soldiers hold nothing but contempt for working people and it’s in that contempt we can find solidarity with one another. Whatever story gets sold and packaged, contempt guides every move of the capitalist class. We see it every day - unspeakable destruction from war and government-sponsored genocide, exploitation of workers and the very gutting of the planet we live on. Only when we realise and utilise the utter contempt held for us can we reach a level of class consciousness that will provide an adequate challenge to capital”.

The album’s artwork comes courtesy of seminal photomontage artist and prominent anti-war campaigner Peter Kennard, who has provided the cover art for ‘Contempt’ alongside a selection of images in the album’s zine and inserts. Described by the late John Pilger as ranking among the most important of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Kennard’s art holds a mirror to the wars waged against humanity, creating challenging works that have informed the visual culture of conflict and crisis in modern history.

The associated further reading within ‘Contempt’ adds more fuel to the fire. ‘Towards an Uncivil Solidarity’ by Alasdair Dunn of Scottish metal avant-gardists Ashenspire attacks capital’s centrality in the UK’s homelessness crisis. It details and sources that at the time of writing, there are 248,000 long-term empty properties in England alone, and 3069 people sleeping rough. He says that “I believe, if everyone felt, truly FELT the horror of continuous rough sleeping, of the desperation and the hunger, we’d have a revolution within the week”. The second, ‘Mud, Metal and Moonlight’, tracks the movements of a radical group dismantling traps and sabotaging the badger cull, which has been proven time and again to do more harm than good to the environment. They are hard but necessary reads that give context to the emotion that pours from ‘Contempt’ and demand action.

Our take: One thing I really love about collecting old anarcho-punk records (and some well-done reissues) is how intensely local to particular times and places they can be. Sometimes reading those dense, text-heavy inserts and poster sleeves can feel like flipping through yesterday’s newspapers, and while that might seem like a bad thing on the surface, I love it. By contrast, in today’s increasingly globalized punk scene, even the most political bands tend to focus on concerns that are more abstract and universal, reflecting the more homogenous, globalized world most of us inhabit. Bad Breeding has always been an exception to this rule. While their anarchist, anti-capitalist philosophy might be abstract, they’ve always pushed their music and the materials that accompany their records to find the point where the rubber meets the road and these ideals get put into practice. For instance, there’s an essay in Contempt’s insert about badger culling in the UK. It just so happens that I have a habit of tuning in to BBC4 as I’m going to sleep, which often falls at precisely the time the program Farming Today airs. So I am (improbably) familiar with badger culling, which many farmers support in order to curb the spread of bovine tuberculosis. I’ve listened to a few stories about the topic, but none of them even hinted at animal rights activists’ efforts to disrupt these culls. The essay in Contempt is from the perspective of one of these activists, writing vividly and concretely about the work they do, often in dangerous circumstances. While badger culling might seem like a niche interest for a North Carolinian punk, I love that Bad Breeding has taken me out of my world and transported me somewhere completely different, giving me the opportunity to reflect on those differences. While different camps within Bad Breeding’s fanbase might get more or less out of the political element of their output, their music continues to grow and evolve. In some ways, Bad Breeding is the quintessential Iron Lung Records band, a near-personification of the label’s aesthetic of thoughtful, forward-thinking (but still maximally intense) hardcore punk. Another thing I’ve always loved about Bad Breeding (this is their fifth 12" record by the way, and I have loved them all) is that they aren’t constrained by the retro sensibilities that limit so many bands inspired by the politics and the aesthetics of 80s UK anarcho-punk. While there are a lot of sounds on Contempt that fit that mold, there are a lot more that don’t, including the scorching metal guitar solos (a new wrinkle on Contempt), the harsh industrial / power electronics production choices (Ben Greenberg from Uniform recorded and mixed Contempt, and there’s a lot of “studio-as-instrument” stuff going on), surprising flashes of melody, and plenty more. I’ve always thought many anarcho-punk bands took musical inspiration from Killing Joke’s early records, and Contempt makes it sound like Bad Breeding took the whole journey with Killing Joke, with the more bombastic moments recalling that band’s self-titled record from 2003 with Dave Grohl on drums. As with every Bad Breeding record, there’s so much here, from the music to the politics to the production to the lyrics to the supplementary materials, and it’s all thoughtful, exciting, and bitingly relevant in 2024. It can be fun to flip through yesterday’s newspapers, but it’s even more gratifying to get real insight into what’s happening in the here and now.