Placebo
Never Let Me Go
So Recordings/Elevator Lady/Rise
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For fans like me, nine years was too long a wait, but I’m now convinced Placebo held onto Never Let Me Go until just the right time.
Flinging out from a half-decade-long creative cocoon, the London-based band began their follow-up to Loud Like Love (2013) in 2018. Upon drummer Steve Forrest’s departure three years prior, the newfound two-piece of vocalist and guitarist Brian Molko and bassist Stefan Olsdal intentionally fashioned a fresh approach to their eighth LP, curiously conceiving of the cover art ahead of making the music.
And, true to Placebo’s characteristically cynical spirit, they didn’t envisage a rosy realm. Rather, a digitized doomsday Earth disturbs the cover—once-crystalline glaciers besmirched by humanity’s self-serving touch.
Yet, appearances oft deceive. Despite its unsettling facade, Placebo’s Never Let Me Go delivers an effortlessly satisfying—even reassuring—ride, veering vivaciously toward a pandemic-emergent, still imperiled, spring.
Yes, pop the pill of Placebo, and flirt with mental trickery: From earliest career single, “Bruise Pristine,” Placebo have maintained a flair for deriving pleasure from the pain, and melding escapism with epiphany, ultimately posing the question: Is psychological retreat a pathway to self-destructive tragedy or self-empowering triumph?
A Placebo enthusiast since sophomore effort Without You I’m Nothing (1998), I’d prefer, for once, to sit out the riddle—or at least gloss over it awhile. Arriving two years after the world fell into lockdown and boasting playful lyrics like “I see faces on the bathroom floor / Come on over and I'll show you more,” Never Let Me Go offers everything my restless soul desires—radiant defiance, journal-jotted poetics, and kinetic songcraft.
Importantly, it also transports me to my first memories of Placebo—reawakening that latent-decidedly-not-lost invincibility of youth.
Indeed, at first darkened blush, Placebo’s eighth studio effort seems an enchantingly boisterous return to form, slinging my mid-40s self right back to slinky college nights.
I’d discovered Placebo’s Without You I’m Nothing while working at the UCLA radio station. An alternative band that defied Britpop, electronica, grunge and other popular ‘90s genres, Placebo’s idiosyncratic brand of rock fast affixed themselves into my daily soundscape.
Lyrically and sonically, they were a logical complement to ‘80s darkwave. Emotionally, they embodied the sanctuary and adventure I’d seek within clubs like Asylum, Perversion and Stigmata. Dancing through our darkness with kindred-spirited strangers. Aswirl with release in magenta-soaked rooms. Our black-lined eyes shining with some part possibility and every bit abandon.
This was the allure of Placebo—blatant shirking of the claustrophobic trappings of the manufactured mainstream. Marginalization, be damned. Placebo had a way of coaxing from us outsiders a daring sense of excitement and independence.
So, when Never Let Me Go arrived last week, despite knowing the band’s ethos, it was easy to mistake the outpouring as a product of the pandemic—a bounding, liberating endeavor designed to process, and extricate from, the suffocating, nonsensical last two years. A period in which all security blankets were snuggled, and all self-medication swallowed (and likely not in moderation).
In fact, where singer Molko once swore off drugs after dabbling perhaps a bit too deeply, opening track, “Forever Chemicals,” immediately glints with that mischievous Placebo edge, causing one to wonder whether he’s using again. Mechanical, clanging and beckoningly cryptic, the track culminates in a typically disaffected Placebo chorus: “It’s all good / When I feel nothing / It’s all good / When I’m not there / It’s all good / When nothing matters / It’s all good / When no one cares.”
Indulgent, misanthropic and addictive—after some nine years, we’re certainly off to an intoxicating start.
“Beautiful James,” the album’s first single, builds on the momentum, a seeming cry of resurgence for a post-closed-down world: “Bring me back to life / Never let me go / Your troubles and your strife / I saw them / Take me by the hand / As we cross through battlefields / Nobody understands / ‘Cause there's nobody at the wheel.”
After being stuck at home and having to be so careful, who doesn’t love the idea of throwing caution to the wind and just taking off running—how ever haphazardly and cinematically—into oblivion?
But, even in the song, the narrator is aware of the fantasy, with Molko repeating the chorus: “Beautiful James / I don’t want to wake you.” This pull, the palpable tension between eluding and confronting reality, pervades the album.
While Never Lets Me Go affords all the uncontained gusto of what might develop after an isolating, once-in-a-lifetime-type event, the truth is Placebo had recorded the bulk of the 13-track album before lockdown orders went into effect. When the duo left London’s RAK Studios on March 20, 2020, they had every intention of releasing their nearly completed work that summer.
As weeks turned to months with the pandemic wearing on, Placebo opted to pause plans. In keeping with the post-apocalyptic artwork they’d conjured well before COVID, Molko’s original lyrics were focused on a different global crisis—climate change. Cleverly titled songs like “The Prodigal” and “Try Better Next Time” brim with natural allusion and portray the utopian planet that could be long after humans are gone: “When I return / Prodigal son / This wounded world / Will be as one.”
Although bitter at humankind for the havoc we’ve wreaked and undoubtedly delivering a fierce, last-ditch wake-up call (“It’s a gas, it’s a party / On this planet of flakes / Somebody, take a picture / Before it's too late), Never Let Me Go maintains a modicum of hope, drawing on the constancy of the cosmos (“The constellations will never fall”) and laying accountability on the individual to affect change within oneself (“Go fix yourself / Instead of someone else”).
The album raises questions about who we are to ourselves, in our daily interactions with one another and the greater world: Will we grow and evolve in our time on this planet? And what impact will we have on each other—and on Earth?
Molko took this exploration to heart, actively assessing his own thoughts and behaviors and ultimately repenning the lyrics to a few of the songs to better reflect his views while the pandemic rocked us all.
Years in the making, Placebo have done their part: Refined, relevant, and raucous, Never Let Me Go is a gift fulfilling both the promise of escape and resurrection—a perfect accompaniment to this strange new season of the pandemic and humanity itself.
Notable Tracks: “Beautiful James” | “Fix Yourself” | “The Prodigal” | “Sad White Reggae” | “Surrounded By Spies”
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