The Mekons Wrestle With Evils Past and Present

Seven months into 2025, the big headline is that America is a hot fuckin’ mess. Thank the maker for this better news: The Mekons are coming to town! With nearly five decades of punk deconstruction and folk reconstruction under their belt, the U.K.-founded group is back with the incredibly timed Horror LP, 12 songs of barbed social commentary with a deep sense of history and careening sense of melody. Horror finds the band making some of the best music of their 48-year career, incorporating all the disparate sounds they’ve dabbled in over the decades, and cranking out songs that are ferocious and focused in a way that only comes with hard-earned experience. We caught up with guitarist and singer Jon Langford ahead of Wednesday’s show at City Winery.

“I still believe in grassroots, believe in changing things,” Langford tells the Scene. “I believe in exercising power — you can actually have some influence on things. And I think it’s largely a very positive enterprise with [the band]. It’s a group of friends who have been playing music together for a long time. A lot of the forces of commercialism and economics tell us we shouldn’t do it, and we should actually stop. A lot of people [have been] telling us we should stop for years. And it’s active, kind of bloody-minded resistance, really, to keep going.”

That bloody-mindedness, that refusal to get along to go along, has defined the band since its inception. It is the through line that connects the band’s punk roots to its current incarnation. Longtime fans will breathe a sigh of relief as Horror returns to familiar themes, updated for our current era of all-out fucking fascism. Yes, everything is terrible. But having the whole Mekon gang in your earphones, reminding you that we’ve seen these terrors before and made it through, will remind you that art and camaraderie are the building blocks of resistance to a world that wants to commodify and control you for capitalist gains.

“I mean, the content of the lyrics on the albums — we can’t help ourselves but locate it in the context that we are living in,” Langford explains. “And that’s just the way it works with us. And people are free to ignore us if they want. Many do.”

In an era when many of the punks of their vintage have basically been reduced to marketing merchandise for the nostalgia-industrial complex, the Mekons are still pushing themselves and their music in new directions. Which isn’t to say they’ve abandoned the works that built their reputation, but they aren’t making past victories the entirety of their existence.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Fear and Whiskey, the first of five, maybe six masterpieces in their catalog. Those songs have been making their way into set lists. The fact that tunes such as “Hard to Be Human Again” are as relevant as ever is a bit depressing — the renewed threat of global thermonuclear annihilation is a big ol’ bummer — but, damn, are they a great soundtrack for waiting for the bombs to drop. It is a testament to the Mekons’ vision that the decades haven’t dulled their edge one bit.

“With this [band], it’s very much a potluck dinner sort of situation,” says Langford. “People bring a lot of things to the table, and then we can try and make a sensible meal out of it. I feel like the band, as a band, it’s as good as it’s ever been, if not better. Which is strange to say, but I think this album’s very strong. I’m really proud of it. And there’s really no reason to just knock you on the head because you’re supposed to.”

Horror kicks off with “The Western Design,” a laid-back reggae tune that is a primer on British colonialism, putting nearly 500 years of fucked-up shit in perspective. The unsettling predatory lope of “Private Defense Contractor” is a spiritual sequel to Red Krayola’s avant-psych classic “War Sucks.” As tense as that song is, it feels like a relieved gasp after you’ve held your breath for the entirety of its immediate predecessor, the beautiful and piano-driven “A Horse Has Escaped.”

The Mekons have always been about progress, evolution, forward movement. While they could join their peers selling butter or bad politics, trying new things and going into new places while still engaged with the moral that made them Mekons in the first place is the plan going forward.

“I think in the future we’re going to explore other avenues to do special, more special and more interesting and weird things. Yeah, [we’ve] got to keep it interesting.”