The Zine UK

We've been following MOSES since the beginning, when that eponymous 2016 EP landed, and they got their first BBC Radio 1 play from Annie Mac. At The Zine UK, we knew immediately we'd found kindred spirits: a working-class band with no interest in playing the game, only in burning down the board.

Now, nearly a decade on, they remain favourites of ours, not because they've softened or sold out, but because they've doubled down on everything that made them vital in the first place. CAPITALISE this, their third album, is proof that some bands don't compromise; they calcify into something harder, sharper, more necessary.

There's a bitter irony in titling an album CAPITALISE this in 2025, when capital has already capitalised everything: your grief, your resistance, your identity, even your death.

MOSES know this. They've always known it. From Almost Everything Is Bullshit (2020) through I Still Believe! Do You? (2022), they've been documenting the slow-motion collapse of a system built on lies. And watching them evolve through lockdowns, through the flatlining of the independent circuit, through the universal hardship artists face behind the scenes has been like watching a wound refuse to close. Which is exactly what we need.

Created with multi-award-winning producer (and wizard) Gavin Monaghan at Wolverhampton's Magic Garden Studios (the same partnership that birthed their first two albums), CAPITALISE this is what This Feeling, the UK's top independent promoter, previewed as "the third and bound to be big breakthrough album." It's a statement of classic rock intent that's already receiving national radio play from Steve Lamacq (BBC Radio 6Music) and John Kennedy (Radio X), alongside official Spotify and Apple Music playlists. But accolades aside, this is music for the exhausted, the disillusioned, the ones still showing up to protest even when the news cameras have fucked off. For those of us who've stood outside courtrooms in solidarity, who've planted flags on occupied land and called it ours again, who've stewarded our people through state harassment and called it love.

MOSES (Victor on vocals, Matthew on drums, Morgan on guitar, and Frazer on bass) traffic in the kind of guitar-driven urgency that recalls the Manics at their most venomous, but without the stadium-rock polish. There's grit here, the kind that gets under your nails and won't wash out. It's the sound of a band who've watched their mates priced out of cities, seen the NHS bled dry, witnessed the criminalisation of dissent, and decided the only reasonable response is to turn the amps up and refuse to shut up. They've supported Feeder, Ash, The Enemy, played Reading and Leeds, Download, and The Great Escape. They've rocked Camden Koko, played The Roundhouse, appeared at SXSW in Austin, where new fans followed them from showcase to showcase, where the Texas Stars Ice Hockey team adopted 'Cause You Got Me' as their goal-horn anthem, a tradition that continues to this day.

The production is deliberately unpolished: raw vocals that crack at the edges, guitars that snarl rather than soar. This isn't music designed to be streamed passively while you scroll through the apocalypse on your phone. It demands your body, your attention, your complicity. When MOSES howl about mental health being "as important as oxygen," it's not a plea, it's an accusation. Because we live in a world where oxygen itself is being privatised, where clean air is a postcode lottery, where breathing freely is a class privilege.

Lyrically, the album operates in multiple registers: sometimes direct political invective, sometimes elliptical poetry that gestures at the unspeakable. There are echoes of rage-as-prayer, but there's also a weariness here, a bone-deep fatigue that comes from fighting battles our parents fought, that our grandparents fought, that our great-grandparents fought, and still, still, the boot presses down on the neck of the working class, the migrant, the colonised.

We've championed MOSES from the start because they understand something fundamental: art from working-class communities isn't decoration. It's survival. It's documentation. It's evidence for the trial that history will eventually hold. Their songs soundtrack Simon Baker's entire film 90 Minutes (produced by ex-England footballer Rio Ferdinand, who makes a cameo). Baker, the acclaimed filmmaker and working-class champion who also directed the video for 'Cause You Got Me', the track that opens Almost Everything Is Bullshit and appears on the Tomb Raider movie soundtrack, which has been played on CBS Good Morning America, remains a heartfelt theme at their live shows.

The album's title serves as both thesis and threat. CAPITALISE this. Go on, then. Turn our suffering into content. Monetise our rage. Package our resistance and sell it back to us as lifestyle branding. MOSES dare the system to do its worst, knowing full well it already has. The pent-up frustration of lockdown tiny-car journeys between London and Wolverhampton, of believing in your songs when the entire infrastructure is designed to crush independent artists, of still showing up even when most people don't know you exist, all of it unleashed across eleven tracks of audio fireworks.

What saves this from being merely nihilistic, what has always saved MOSES, is the undercurrent of solidarity that runs through the work. This is music that understands the power of collective action, even if it's just the collective action of bodies in a room, moving together, shouting together, refusing together. We've seen this firsthand. When Philip Selway of Radiohead showed up to their London gig and rated them as terrific, when UK fans travelled to Bucharest's iconic Control club for their first European show (invited back by popular demand for an even bigger crowd in 2025), when visionary filmmaker JJ Eringa took the band to the top of The Mount in Surrey to capture their joy of playing for the 'SUPREME' video, these aren't just career milestones. They're proof that connection still matters, that community can be forged in the wreckage.

For those of us still fighting for Palestinian liberation and for the survival of the working class in all its forms, CAPITALISE this offers no easy answers, no false hope. What it offers instead is recognition. A mirror held up to the grotesque absurdity of a world where billionaires play at space travel while children drown in the Mediterranean. Where the same politicians who criminalise protest attend arms fairs. Where "austerity" is always for the poor, never for the profiteers.

This is an album that refuses to be recuperated, refuses to be made safe, refuses to be anything other than what it is: a howl of defiance from a band we're proud to call favourites. A band with soul. A band who know the house is burning but won't stop screaming until everyone else wakes up to the smell of smoke. Their 2026 album tour shows are planned to share this joy with their "awesome choir crowd following," and if you've never experienced MOSES live, you're missing the ritual, the space where the alienation of late capitalism momentarily dissolves into something like hope, even when hope feels obscene.

Remember, remember the 5th of November. CAPITALISE this is audio fireworks.

Capitalise that.

For fans of: Manic Street Preachers (Everything Must Go-era rage), early Futureheads, the political fury of Sleaford Mods