Primal Scream have announced a one-off show in London to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their album ‘XTRMNTR’.
As announced on social media this afternoon (October 6), Bobby Gillespie and co. will play at the Roundhouse on December 8, with tickets set to go on sale at 10am on Friday (October 10). You will be able to find yours here.
Gillespie has said: “’XTRMNTR’ was a very prescient album. It’s more relevant today than when we first released it 25 years ago, as the world has become a much darker and uncertain place since then. It’s time to play those songs again.”
‘XTRMNTR’ marked a major departure for Primal Scream, as they embraced a harsher, more provocative sonic palette that drew from industrial, hard electronic and noise rock sounds. The Chemical Brothers and My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields were involved in the production, while former Stone Roses bassist Mani shared songwriting credits with the band for the first time.
The record also saw the band grapple with dark political themes, taking aggressive stances on government ideologies and self-serving global power structures on tracks like ‘Swastika Eyes’, an assault on authoritarianism and the corrosive effect of corporate greed.
On its release, NME rated the album 9/10 and wrote: “Meet the new year, same as the old year. Radicalism doesn’t pay, complacency’s at an all-time high, so keep your head down, smile for the cameras, mind your language and stick to the Third Way. The music scene’s not so hot, either. That we could do with a fully plugged-in, turned-on, fucked-off Primal Scream at this point is hardly front-page news; for ‘Exterminator’ to pulverise the senses with quite such righteous, incendiary beauty most definitely is.”
The record went on to be named by NME as the second-best album of 2000, it picked up the Best Album award at the 2001 NME Awards and later landed at Number Three in our Albums of the Decade list.
Primal Scream remain politically outspoken to this day, recently joining hundreds of other artists in joining the No Music For Genocide campaign, a cultural boycott in which musicians pull their work from major streaming platforms in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
They also called on Keir Starmer to “end UK complicity” in the Gaza offensive this summer, and are set to play at the ‘Gig For Gaza’ event at London’s Troxy on October 17.
Elsewhere, it has been announced that Primal Scream will appear on the forthcoming Pet Shop Boys remix album ‘Disco 5’, alongside the likes of Noel Gallagher, Sleaford Mods and Paul Weller. The album is released on November 21 and you can pre-order it here.
