Liars’ new album A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans harnesses Angus Andrew’s incomparable gift for sonic world-building to confront the bureaucratic absurdity and corporate power he encountered while living in middle America.
Shortly after relocating to Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his wife and daughter, Angus Andrew smelled something. A thick odour surrounded their home and his daughter’s school, like “wet cardboard, but much more chemical-y”. The culprit was toxic hydrogen sulphide, among other pollutants, released by a local packaging factory at levels deemed so dangerous that the state health department advised residents to “stay indoors”. Angus soon found himself drawn into an uphill campaign to hold the factory accountable, confronting a tangle of environmental damage, corporate responsibility and institutional inertia. He absorbed the frustrations and absurdities of the experience into Liars’ music, transforming the realities of everyday life into something stranger and more unsettling.
“You become so used to something, you lose your sense of it.”
That idea sits at the centre of A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans: 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 is based on an actual Michigan law that prohibits local governments from banning single-use plastic bags. Its absurd bureaucratic logic became a kind of shorthand for Angus’s experience of Michigan, where attempts to reduce environmental harm could themselves become something to prohibit.
Formed in New York in 2000, Liars have always been a shapeshifting, alien presence at the edges of contemporary music. From the shifty dance-punk of 2001’s They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top to a string of radically inventive albums – including 2006’s Drums Not Dead (which will be performed in full at Poland’s Unsound Festival this year for its 20th anniversary), 2017’s TFCF and 2021’s The Apple Drop – Liars have never stood still. The Apple Drop was released as lockdowns made touring impossible and, for the first time since he was a teenager, Angus stopped thinking about making another record. Instead, he threw himself into other projects: founding the record label No Gold and experimental music platform Essential Tremors. “Both of those things were really about listening,” he says, “stepping back from being a full-time creator and connecting with these other artists”. Through both projects, he also began “listening and responding to the environment in Kalamazoo.”
Angus, his wife and a group of concerned residents began calling on the school board to acknowledge the pollution and install air monitors to establish the extent of the danger to local schoolchildren. It was Angus’s first real experience of activism: “We were the weird people at the school pickup, handing out flyers listing the amounts of toxic gas we were all breathing. We made petitions and enacted community outreach. I really thought we could get the community outraged enough to force the school board to notice. It was really shocking to find a lot of people didn’t want to hear about it.” Angus began to feel broken by the struggle, and increasingly insecure as a white Australian inserting himself into a decades-long issue affecting a predominantly Black neighbourhood. “Everyone’s got a fight they’re in, and much bigger fights than the one I was involved with. It felt like a drop in a horrendous ocean of problems.” His wife continued the fight, but Angus felt increasingly alienated, while his awareness of the wider crises unfolding across the United States deepened.
After the longest period of his career without making music, Angus eventually realised something strange had happened: he had been making an album the whole time. He just hadn’t created any sound yet. He was not interested in making a traditional political album, or in turning the record into a soapbox for a particular cause. Instead, he became interested in the absurdity of the bureaucracy surrounding these struggles, and in the imbalance of power that allows corporations to exert influence across so many levels of everyday life. “It’s got more to do with the perception of things than modern pollution – how these things that can be a constant in your life become sort of ingrained and invisible.”
Rather than documenting those events literally, the record captures the psychological atmosphere of living within those frustrations: a place where environmental damage becomes normalised, where power feels ironclad and untouchable, and where defeat slowly becomes woven into everyday life. Originally, Angus intended to title the album after the factory, directly referencing the company whose presence had shaped both his daily life and the record itself. During production, however, legal advice stated that using the company’s name as the album title presented an unnecessary legal risk. The irony was difficult to ignore: after spending years trying to challenge the influence of a corporation over the physical environment of a community, he found himself confronting its perceived influence over language itself. Before anyone had heard the album, its first compromise had already been made: its title had been negotiated.
The album was written and recorded between the States and Australia, where Angus now resides. Reuniting with avant-garde jazz drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell – both collaborators on The Apple Drop and touring partners since TFCF – the three musicians brought an intuitive working language to the sessions. Rather than arriving with finished songs, they relied on trust, improvisation and reaction – allowing ideas to evolve across continents without losing their centre of gravity. Cameron Deyell expands, “The songs only really become songs at the very last step of the process. Until then it’s a process of experimentation and discovery – the motto within the band is everything’s up for grabs. Day-to-day this means we’re free to try anything over existing demos, each working in our own studios at home, well for me it’s on my boat.” Laurence Pike goes on to explain, “There’s an exciting sense that everything is always at play. Anugs has an amazing ability to process and reframe ideas, often in the most unexpected ways, so I feel comfortable to give what the music needs and not have to second guess the language of it.”
A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans ultimately becomes a different kind of political album – not only concerned with protest, but also with what it costs a person to keep on fighting. “It wasn’t just the environment that was polluted,” Angus says. “It was also my mind.”
A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans will be released on Mute on 5 March 2027
A BAN ON PLASTIC BAG BANS TRACKLISTING (CAT # STUMM530)
Happy Or Not
Ice Pick, Kalamazoo
Laced Plume
Urgent As Always
Deep Deeper
Disaster Tropes
Beat Creep Some Eyes
Real Time Trespasser
SHAME!
Retention Arc
Out Of Order
