Liars - A Ban on Plastic Bag Bans Liars

A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans is Liars’ 11th studio album, a brooding, mechanical world of lingering tensions. Born from Angus Andrew’s – ultimately unsuccessful - fight against corporate pollution in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the record captures the psychological atmosphere of living within those frustrations.

The album explores how injustice can become part of the background of everyday life, and how exhausting it can be to fight forces that seem too powerful to move. The title, which borrows its name from an actual Michigan law that prohibits local governments from banning single-use plastic bags, is absurd and bureaucratic, and playfully encapsulates the contradictory logic he encountered in his fight, where attempts to reduce environmental harm could themselves become something to prohibit.

The album’s tension was shaped in close collaboration with the avant-garde jazz drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell, who Angus Andrew worked with on previous album, The Apple Drop, and written and recorded between America and Angus’s native Australia, where he now resides.

Angus’s noirish, complex music captures this through insistent synth lines and weathered vocals, beyond which there are constant oddities – cut-up political chants, sudden breakbeats, fragments of guitar or piano – suggesting something is amiss. His abstract lyrics are steeped in bureaucratic language derived from a struggle which, for a while, took over everything. “It wasn’t just the environment that was polluted, it was also my mind.”

WHITE VINYL

Pressed on recycled and recyclable polyethylene terephthalate (PET)
Packaging is protest placard ready

CD

Card Eco Pack, packaging is small protest placard ready