Rotterdam/Kent based trio Dancehall have shared its new single “Modern Age.” The single is the third to be taken from their forthcoming second album, 100% Music, which is due out on October 24th.

“Modern Age” is accompanied by a music video, directed by William Keeler and filmed around Dover and Folkestone. The video features Primal Runners, a local running club that includes asylum seekers and refugees from Gaza and Afghanistan, with whom singer Tim Smithen is directly involved. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of rising anti-migrant hostility in the UK, captured in the refrain “They’re coming to get you”, where right-wing rhetoric, fear-mongering, and flag-waving nationalism (depicted both across the country and in the video) are often masked as patriotism.

Of their new single, Smithen says:
“This song covers some ground. From pollution to right-wing mob politics. Misinformation from mainstream media to the youth of today having to pretend to be something or someone different in order to ‘fit in’”

Dancehall have always existed in the margins: too spiky for pop, too self-aware for grunge. On their new album, singer/bassist Tim Smithen, guitarist Craig Sharp and drummer Dave Keeler double-down and sharpen their edges to deliver the band’s most dialed-in, deliberate work yet.

Written as singer/bassist Tim Smithen became a father and embraced sobriety, the record confronts his own childhood, addiction and neurodivergence. 100% Music, a joke-turned-album-title, became a manifestation, with the band approaching each song as a single, standalone monument to their time together, while reflecting on the bigger events that shape their lives. They dedicated evenings and weekends to tracking and overdubbing, throwing everything they could at the recording process, resulting in an album that reflects the joy the self-declared ‘brothers’ find in forming Dancehall.