Black Francis of Pixies laments the “very dystopian” state of the world: “It feels like we’re going to hell in a handbasket”

Black Francis of alt-rock band Pixies has something to say about recent events happening around the globe, though most of it can be summed up with the phrase “grim and dystopian”.

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The guitarist sat down in a new interview with NME, where he spoke candidly about his disapproval with the current state of affairs, saying: “Some of the events of the last few years, with the Presidential election in the United States and Donald Trump and all that other nonsense, and then the coronavirus pandemic and now worldwide recession, amid these extreme weather patterns, add together all this stuff and it starts to feel very dystopian.”

“There’s rippling tension everywhere you look,” he continued. “There’s an economic strain on people and you see it when you go to Aldi and realise, ‘Shit, there are four security guards in this fucking discount grocery store to make I don’t run off with too many cans of tuna fish for free!’”

“Between that and everything else – the United States banning abortion but not guns, despite the mass shootings, and oh! It’s the hottest day of the year tomorrow – it feels like we’re going to hell in a handbasket, and it’s the most grim and dystopian it’s ever been in my lifetime. I’m embarrassed in front of my children, just sheepishly apologising: ‘Sorry the world’s as corrupt as it is!’”

That said, it’s not all doom and gloom for the artist, who admitted to having a rather idyllic time cooped up at home — free from the intense touring cycle — with his chickens and children during the pandemic lockdowns.

“I was raising chickens and hanging out with my teenagers for a year and a half and I wasn’t necessarily excited about going back into the world, ‘cause everything finally stopped and slowed down and I was able to enjoy a few simple things in my life for the first time,” the 57-year-old explained. “The whole end-of-the-world atmosphere aside, there was a lot of it that felt really good.”

In other Pixies-related news, the band will release their eighth studio album Doggerel this September and have since shared the single There’s A Moon On.

Francis said of the forthcoming album: “We were putting simplicity on a pedestal for this album. As the Japanese would say, why would you want to take this perfectly good piece of fish and ruin it by cooking? We were attracted to minimalism.”

Read the interview in full here.