Never Work by Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom

Work is changing. Robots are replacing us. Capitalism is fracturing. With their second duo album "Never Work," Ariel Sharratt and Mathias Kom (of Canadian garage-folk band The Burning Hell) ask what work songs might sound like in a future where the nature of labour itself is so uncertain. Accenting the acoustic elements of old-school folk revivals with electronic interference, Never Work takes cues from labour activists and Situationist pranksters to explore the gig economy, side-hustles, tech feudalism, class war, unionized digital assistants, rebellious self-service checkout machines, and fully automated luxury communism. Some are songs about workers, some are songs for workers, but most are both at once. Simultaneously earnest and wry, the songs on Never Work are a protest playlist for our collective journey towards oblivion or the beach.

With a rescheduled tour in November and December 2020, Ariel and Mathias will be traveling through Europe, the UK and Canada with a special stage show featuring a robot drummer (voiced by an Amazon Alexa) which they've built as a nod to musical automation. Their eventual hope is to replace themselves with homemade robots as well, who can go on tour in their place. Never work!

The Burning Hell is the ongoing musical project of songwriter Mathias Kom and multi-instrumentalists Ariel Sharratt and Jake Nicoll, often including additional comrades and collaborators.

Their densely populated genre-shifting songs are packed with an abundance of literary, historical, cultural, and pop-cultural forebears, heroes and villains, subjects and objects, stories and hooks.

theburninghell.com