Album Review: The Bad Fire by Mogwai

As veteran indie stalwarts Mogwai enter their 30th year of existence, they find themselves at a crossroads. Since their inception in 1995, they've gone from rebels raging against the Britpop machine to bastions of Glasgow's alternative music scene to their present number one record-selling elder-statesmen status. Crucially, however, Mogwai have never compromised in their vision.

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Feels comfortable. The post-rock titans are back with The Bad Fire, a record whose title stems from a working class Scottish term for hell. It represents the rough times they went through during the last few years, with stories of loss hinted at in the lyrics throughout the few songs that have. Right from the beginning there is a familiar feel to the music, the Glaswegian quartet sinking us once more into their atmospheric universe of glacial keyboard leads over intertwining guitar and bass progressions.

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Given their 11th album’s 24 January 2025 release date, Mogwai seem to have known that things would be challenging for the world after 2024. Its title, The Bad Fire, is Scottish slang for hell. Its song titles include “Hi Chaos” and “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others”. The vibrant cover art by Dave Thomas looks like a volcano awaiting a terrible eruption or perhaps a crater caused by a city-sized asteroid.

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"How should we follow up our first Number One album?" is a happy dilemma for any band and, with all due respect, surely not one Mogwai ever expected to face. Here they are, though; 2021's 'As The Love Continues' was swept to the top of the charts by both a dogged fanbase and a broader wave of goodwill towards a band that began as disruptive post-rock upstarts, but through decades of being avowedly themselves, have found themselves in the position of alternative national treasures. Any air of triumph that might have crept into this eleventh studio album, though, was quickly extinguished by a period of personal turmoil - particularly the life-threatening illness of guitarist Barry Burns' daughter that she is now mercifully through the worst of.

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". . . if anything weighty happens in my life, the last thing I want to do is write a song about it," Stuart Braithwaite told The Herald in 2003. Discussing Mogwai's fourth album, Happy Songs For Happy People, the man sometimes known as "Plasmatron" denied the tracks had been written about anything ….

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