Songs about buildings: the five greatest songs about brutalism
Art has always thrived in the rubble of disaster. It’s a sad reality, but in the same way that artist suffer for their art, communities must also face suffering to enjoy it. While art or, more specifically, music exists as an intangible response to dark days, there’s nothing quite as unwavering and defiant in stature as Britain’s brutalist architecture.
Built on concrete and towering over exhausted communities, they created the shadows in which some of the UK’s most influential bands would develop. Like the artists they cultivated, the buildings represent something deeply paradoxical—harsh exteriors that bullied their way into any given space only to showcase creative nuance and emotional provocation.
Similarly, some of the country’s most tender souls were under the popped collar of a Berghaus jacket and scruffy mod cut. Following the arc of the buildings they stood beneath, these bands made music that spoke directly to their communities, with the knowledge that soon after their completion, the country’s powers that be would no longer accept them as necessary reflections of British society, but rather industrial reminders of an ugly class structure.
Sure, it’s easy to assume that the architectural term brutalism relates to a very direct description of its harsh physical appearance, but in reality, it’s derived from the French word for raw concrete—béton brut. There’s an honesty in its design that its representative music carries on; be it Joy Division, The Fall, or the IDLES, these artists provide an unflinching account of the reality of life in Britain while being defiant and bold with their compositions.
While some artists put these architectural touchstones front-centre of their songs, others used them as evocative landscapes in which their narratives of love, loss and introspection could flourish. Regardless of how they used it, these are the five best songs that are inspired by brutalism.
The five greatest songs about brutalismL
‘The View From The Afternoon’ – Arctic Monkeys
OK, I know what you’re thinking, but there is a reason it sits at five, so hear me out on this one. Nearly half a century after the emergence of any brutalist building, the backdrop on which Alex Turner’s tale is set proves the remnants of its impact are still as relevant as ever.
It’s the lives of furrowed-browed teenagers, quietly harbouring optimism in the shadow of brutalist block flats that are so vividly represented in the opening track of Arctic Monkeys’ documentarian debut album. If the buildings should manifest themselves as bold and robust, then the opening drum sequence that introduces the track is firmly within keeping. Helders’ brick-and-mortar rhythm is filled in with jagged guitar lines and cutting lyricism that portrays the dark progression within the shadows of communities living under brutalist skies. If that wasn’t already apparent from the song, the music video being set in Sheffield’s Park Hill flats should hopefully get the point across.
‘Tear It Down’ – Parastatic
In a searing statement about the politics of brutalism, Newcastle shoegazers Parastatic offer up a pulsating beat about buildings. Late Girl’s vocal delivery on the track is rousing and stark, reflecting the public attitude when they are confronted with the architecture that best represents the nature of the modern society they exist within: ugly functionality.
Speaking about ‘Tear It Down’ and its connection to tumbling destruction to Newcastle’s famed and fallen Get Carter carpark, the band explained, “We saw the climax of this song representing the fury that some people had towards brutalist buildings finally coming to a conclusion as buildings are demolished, detonated and deconstructed.”
That sense of creation and calamity is echoed in the gathering repetition of the building song. “As the song plays from its calm beginnings, we hear the fervour of protest and anger rise in Late Girl’s spoken word delivery,” they explain.
‘Heel/Heal’ – IDLES
IDLES’ debut album never directly referenced brutalist architecture, but the concrete dust packed in every one of its buildings is sprinkled so heavily into the record’s artistic sentiment that the Bristol five-piece felt it necessary to call the record Brutalism.
Joe Talbot told Clash: “I became obsessed with brutalist architecture, where it came from and that ideology of building something fast and quick that helps a community that has been totally fucked.”
Something fast and quick was the rhythmic direction of the band’s drummer, Jon Beavis. In the record’s opening track, Beavis comes firing on all cylinders before Talbot muses over conformity pressures through the lifeless silhouettes of Bovis homes. Staring down a future of new-build conformity, it presents the fearful prospect of bidding farewell to the creativity forged by brutalist living.
‘Industrial Estate’ – The Fall
It is a punk song at its very finest, arming The Fall’s fans with weapons of articulacy to understand the confines in which they lived. It’s in no way ambiguous or subtle, much like the brutalist architecture and industrial landscape it aims to represent. It’s an unapologetic take on concrete Britain.
‘Industrial Estate’ straddles the line between despondency and joy, which brutalism and its surrounding inhabitants embodied. While dissonant yells of ‘Industrial Estate’ fill the space in between very real proclamations that the ‘crap in the air will fuck up your face’, rugged bass lines pair with optimistic piano stabs in what feels like a perfect sonic embodiment of working-class camaraderie.
‘Shadowplay’ – Joy Division
In many ways, Joy Division are the ultimate brutalist band. Rising through the cracks of Maccelsfield’s broken pavements, fractured by the breakdown of a thriving industry in Thatcher’s Britain, they reimagined northern Britain’s brutalist lines and rebuilt them with colour. While tales are to be told of the broken communities and ravaged economic standards of Britain’s northern communities, Ian Curtis had a knack for portraying the internal, unseen wounds of an adolescent life lived in grey-soaked landscapes.
Amidst class warfare and savage deindustrialisation, romance still needed to find its place. But rather than beds of roses and sun-kissed beaches, Curtis paints a frank picture of a city ‘where all roads meet’ and jostling bodies of ‘cold steel odour’ that grate against the metallic melody to showcase an artist who saw the poetry in the otherwise despondent. It’s not an anthem about brutalism rather than an anthem for brutalism, a soundtrack upon which concrete monoliths could sing in protest to the mere thought of wiping their existence from the memories of modern Britain.
