Uncle Kid - Supermarket Sweep

Written By David Dryburgh
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Previously the guitarist in Scottish indie folk band, The Last September, Edinburgh based Craig Nicholson aka Uncle Kid, who produces all his own material, released his debut single, Supermarket Sweep on Friday 13 November

It’s already been described as an "unsettling sound portrait" and "a song for our times" by Tom Robinson of BBC 6 Music.

Supermarket Sweep is the first single from his upcoming EP, Indistinct Chatter and it features a combination of spoken word and singing throughout.

Described as a “song for our times” you can see why, Supermarket Sweep is a personal narrative on the anxiety of living though the COVID pandemic which will certainly ring true for a lot of us.

It’s a brooding trip hop track built around a crushing bassline and glitchy squealing electronic beats that add to the tense dark atmosphere of the song.

That darkness and despair is captured right from the off in the descriptive lyrics of Uncle Kid as he paints a picture of living in these times with the opening lines “supermarket sweep, this shops like a theme park and we’re the freak show, it’s like a really shit Christmas”. The lines could easily have been written by Dr Seuss and uttered by the Grinch !!!

Those illuminating lyrics continue when he sings “somethings been brewing we find a cosy place in miserable ideals, now we’re the ones in the Petri dish, parasites trying to take over the world, fragile the capitalists balloon ever inflated at all costs, how long before it pops”.

Supermarket Sweep fades out to wailing electronic beats as the lyrics tell us “Everyone wants to get back to normal”.

What a debut single from Uncle Kid, written with such depictive lyrics, music that creates a dark tense atmosphere, it leaves us all feeling a sense of Deja Vu as we will have all had the same thoughts at some point during the last few months.

Supermarket Sweep has set a high benchmark for Uncle Kid it I can’t wait to hear more.

Give Supermarket Sweep a stream now:

https://open.spotify.com/album/31Hhe0AIvgIQAW9vyNJHaM?si=0pg9uuhsRICMJajhhmtypw

Uncle Kid has teamed up with Scottish visual artist and inventor, Alan Brown, to create a suitably unsettling video. Filmed everyday during lockdown, the viewer's gaze is held while he evolves from clean shaven, to a heavily bearded, castaway version of himself. Brown's glitchy, warhole-esque production adds to the general sense of unease, give it a view below:

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David Dryburgh
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