Credit: Ellie Slorick

Knats strike down the far-right on new single, ‘Bowling Ball’

Fri 17 July 2026 13:17, UK

If the summer of 2027 can be defined by the ongoing weather crises, the summer of 2026 can be defined by something else: Flags.

Any resident in any postcode across the UK would’ve seen them, appearing as if by magic on lamposts, roundabouts, bridges, balconies and shop windows. Gangs of patriotic Englishmen used the bleach white of St George’s Cross and the garish blue of the Union Jack to delineate the line between welcome and rejected expressions of nationality this side of the pond.

The flags were especially harrowing because they were everywhere, all of the time, pointing to a hidden, insidious anti-immigration sentiment disguised as patriotism. Your neighbour and your neighbour’s neighbour were all-in on a reclamation of a symbol already shrouded in a violent past. As one of the only recent forms of community-building in our increasingly polarised society, many found it sickening to note that the camaraderie was based on exclusionary, inflammatory ideals.

This is exactly what Geordie jazz trailblazers Knats are getting at in their new tune, ‘Bowling Ball’, produced by long-standing collaborator Geordie Greep, who also sits behind the mixing desk on their latest album, A Great Day In Newcastle. Yet, their newest single, recorded, mixed, and mastered at London’s inimitable Metropolis studios, paints a darker picture than the album title otherwise suggests.

Bassist Stan Woodward, the mastermind behind the song’s poetic musings, explained that the track was written “in response to the disgusting rise of the far right across the UK. It was written a few days after attending the counter-protest against the English Defence League on the West Road, in the west end of Newcastle.” Woodward and his mother were astounded at the vitriolic form of patriotism on display.

In an accompanying documentary to the song, the band calls the ubiquitous flags “despicable,” insisting that we “need to speak against it”. In comes ‘Bowling Ball’, a song that posits “the billionaires, or the powers that be or the people that create division in society imagined as a bowling ball, and they’re setting up migrants and whoever to knock them down.”

The song is dripping with fierce political aphorisms looking to expose the disgusting tactics of the far-right through an avant-rock arrangement, thrashing through the ugliness until it turns to outrage.

“You’ve been making your point in a roundabout way,” vocalist Cooper Robson begins in his thick Geordie drawl. “It’s all swings and roundabouts, and tins at roundabouts, crimson roundabouts, crime and whataboutery.”

The language, often tripping over itself with its clever internal twists and turns, exposes the fraught tension that defines British politics today, a sliding descent into evil, sibilance and similes included.

If the searing poetic wanderings and the thwacking jazz flourishes aren’t enough to symbolise a society spinning out of control, the band paints the picture in a language that the culprits will know all too well: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but Britain made them brittle, addicted to payday loans to mitigate the pittance.”

Knats might be unmasking the malevolence and monstrosity behind the rise of the far-right, but the tune isn’t intended to be hopeless. Rather, the lifelong friends remind us, they’ve released ‘Bowling Ball’ into the world “to prove a point that we can rally together, we can be greater than this minority of people who are trying to divide us.”

Watch the documentary for the new tune below.