‘Nuclear Word’: The punk cut wrestling humour from 2025’s end times paranoia
Reasons to be cheerful are fast vanishing in the contemporary malaise.
Amid global right-wing lurch, certain ecological collapse, and daily battering of the cost of living, laughs feel few and far between when navigating the failed hellscape of capitalism.
Throw in layers upon layers of tech dystopia and buzzing media noise, and we’re in for a real nightmare. The disconcerting Matryoshka world we live in – where narratives hide within narratives with bamboozling infinitum – has pushed many to a panicked grab for certitude, a desperate clamour for clarity in the upside-down world we have no agency in. Once one has found a position that seemingly makes sense and meets all their needs and wants, one becomes entrenched in that worldview, no matter how scrambled.
Once again, it’s up to Clevedon’s punk community to provide a cathartic riposte to the global rot. Hailing from the rich tradition of acerbic eccentrics from Electric Eels, Dead Boys, and Pere Ubu, the gang behind Cruelster for the best part of a decade have been spitting a warped and idiosyncratic take on Ohio hardcore, dripping with snotty humour and sharply surrealist lyrics that wear a love of Devo firmly on their sleeves.
Dropping their recent LP via Convulse Records, Make Them Wonder Why’s key cut gleefully steps into the absurd, parading a prominent hacktivist and scourge of the Western powers as an avatar for cryptic international gameplaying and political gaslighting.
‘Nuclear Word’ posits a discoloured and askance semi-reality where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is in the hotly desired possession of the nuclear codes. Two separate forces are chasing after the wanted fugitive, fueled by the top-down rhetorical bludgeoning of his supposed international Bond villainy. Racing around the globe, from Costa Rica to Puerto Rico, while Assange is holed up in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, the two shady agents are desperately zigzagging the world to capture him for themselves and scoop out the doomsday info buried in the WikiLeaks vaults. The band adopts these personas, resulting in their swift assassination by shadowy officials who will never let the little people “go too close to the sun”.
Keeping up? Not only are the band/agents chasing after the nuclear codes, but they’re also lost in a linguistic and etymological labyrinth that somewhere, somehow, weaves January 6th United States Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick and the possible Latin roots of his surname by varying degrees orbiting the word “world” due to Latin’s foundational alphabet in the West.
“I’m screaming out your name / Julian Assange, I saw you in psychosis / You are my pagan spiral / My own Nelson / Nelson Mandela!” one of the three vocalists bleats during ‘Nuclear Word’s blistering close. Almost lifting JG Ballard’s practice of scooping out the icons and symbols of the pop-cultural landscape à la The Atrocity Exhibition, Cruelster’s paranoid jaunt to WW III scenarios lapses into a dissolving psych-mulch of frayed sanity, yet without a shred of wavering doubt in how the higher powers are stacked against them.
It’s messy, headache-inducing, and packed with twisted humour. Cruelster’s ‘Nuclear Word’ channels contemporary unease and conspiratorial fetor with no less mania than the average scroll on social media but with a giant, crooked grin on its face.
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