YNES: Better Job – single review

YNES

Better Job

Out Now!

With Better Job, YNES takes a vicious and delicious stab at the government for its stark failures during a once-in-a-century pandemic. 

Better Job strikes back at Rishi Sunak’s suggestion, back in October 2020, that everyone in the creative industry without employment due to the pandemic simply ‘go and get a different job,’ putting the musicians and venues we love at risk of extinction without a seeming care in the world. While the new single is designed to take UK politicians to task, it also takes aim at sexism and cultural elitism more broadly:

Maybe I should get a better job — one where I can wear a tie to work
Actually I’m a woman, it’ll have to be a mini skirt.

YNES’s slam-bang voice and spikey lyrics are like a glorious fusing of X-Ray Spex and PiL. For the twenty-first century listener who longs to get back to the early promises of punk, Better Job is everything you could want right at this moment. The song has so many satisfying layers of irony, signalled by a melodic and oh-so-singable chorus with words that serve up a cosmic fuck you:

Retrain me
Teach me how to be 
A morally upstanding
Member of society
Retrain me
Teach me how to be fucking boring
Show me conformity 
Please

Better Job is exactly the kind of track I’ll play on repeat until I know the lyrics and can belt them out loudly in step with YNES. I haven’t felt this kind of cathartic release in singing along since screaming out the words to Head Like a Hole with Trent Reznor and everyone else in the crowd at a Nine Inch Nails show (long before the words pandemic and lockdown entered into the modern lexicon, of course). 

For YNES, Better Job started out as a 30-second jingle following the UK government’s disparaging language about the creative industry. It got thousands of views and led to a BBC interview. When the third lockdown got announced, YNES knew it was time to write and record a full track from home with a saturated and stylish music video to match. 

YNES’s new track is addictive in the best possible way. And if you become as hooked as I am, you can buy and wear song merch to shoot daggers at all those naysaying passersby. 

YNES is an English-Canadian musician and self-described “professional fuck-up” who draws inspiration from 80s and 90s sounds and from the DIY ethos of punk. You can find YNES on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, and Bandcamp.

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You can follow Audrey on Twitter and Instagram, and you can check out her personal website to learn more about her writing and her archive of books, records, and ephemera.

Source: louderthanwar.com