Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
There is a comforting lie we tell ourselves about the future of art. We imagine it as a perpetual frontier, a place of radical invention and fearless disruption. We look at the cultural calendar for a year like 2024 and see a vibrant mosaic of innovation: rock titans reinventing themselves, grime legends reaching new peaks, experimentalists breaking ground. But squint a little, adjust your focus, and a different picture emerges. It is less a mosaic and more a meticulously restored fresco. The future, it turns in fact, sounds an awful lot like the past.
The thesis is a simple and rather depressing one. In an age of profound political anxiety and economic freefall, our cultural commissars – the festival bookers, the record label executives, the artistic directors of our great institutions – have lost their nerve. The defining sound of 2024 is not one of bold progression but of strategic retreat. We are not witnessing the birth of the new, but the canonisation of the familiar. It is a year of glorious, high-fidelity nostalgia, a collective flight to the safety of established forms and proven assets, all cleverly marketed as the bleeding edge.
Look no further than The Smile. Billed as a ‘new chapter’, it is, of course, the sound of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, which is to say, the sound of the most critically unimpeachable brand in alternative rock for the past thirty years. It is a magnificent project, complex and beautiful. But it is new in the way a Bentley convertible is new: the engineering is superb, the finish is immaculate, but the shape of the thing is designed to evoke a glorious heritage. It offers not the shock of the new, but the profound, artisanal comfort of the familiar. For a generation that came of age with OK Computer, it is the sonic equivalent of slipping into a pair of expensive, perfectly worn-in leather shoes. Nothing here will frighten the horses.
This is the sound our anxious age demands: a reverb from a room we’ve already left. And it is a profoundly British condition. We are a nation obsessed with our own cultural back-catalogue, endlessly curating and repackaging our past glories. Consider the case of Ghetts. A pioneer, a genius of the form, who is now releasing his ‘most ambitious’ work and being celebrated as a legend at his ‘peak’. This is not a critique of his immense talent, but of the cultural moment that chooses to elevate him now. The celebration of Ghetts in 2024 is the final gentrification of grime. It marks the point where a once-dangerous, disruptive sound from the council estates of London becomes a heritage act, fit for broadsheet profiles and a comfortable slot on the Pyramid Stage. It is the sound of rebellion safely ensconced in the museum.
The Gilded Rear-View Mirror
This impulse is not confined to popular music. It is an aesthetic that snakes its way right into the plush-velvet corridors of our most revered institutions. The Royal Opera House, that grand temple of high culture in Covent Garden, presents its vision for 2024. Is it a daring new commission from a young British composer tackling the intractable chaos of our present cultural weather? Is it an opera about knife crime, or the housing crisis, or the slow collapse of the social contract? No. It is Elektra. A towering, sensational masterpiece of German modernism from 1909.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but presenting a 115-year-old opera, however brilliant, as a vital part of the contemporary conversation feels less like artistic direction and more like panicked curation. It’s the same reflex, the same retreat into the bomb-proof shelter of the established masterpiece. The risk is outsourced to a dead composer. The audience gets its dose of searing, primal emotion, but from a safe historical distance. The trauma is contained within the proscenium arch, a story from long ago and far away. It asks nothing of our current political reality because it has nothing to do with it. The pairing of The Smile’s ‘new’ album with the Royal Opera’s ‘new’ production of Elektra reveals the game: they are both beautiful ghosts, spectres of past triumphs summoned to soothe our turbulent present.
The counter-argument, of course, arrives in the form of the genuinely brilliant L’Rain. Here is an artist, Taja Cheek, who truly is forging a new path, whose music is a thrillingly strange and unclassifiable synthesis of genres. She is the proof, one might argue, that innovation is alive and well. Yet she is the exception that proves a very comfortable rule.
Her essential brilliance, and her relative niche appeal compared to the stadium-filling nostalgia of her peers, only highlights the conservatism of the mainstream. She is the fig leaf of experimentation, the artist the industry can point to in order to legitimise its otherwise risk-averse programming. We allow a few hardy plants to grow in the cracks, whilst the main lawn is reserved for comfortable, well-established evergreens.
I once found myself, to my shame, at a ‘90s Britpop club night in Camden. I was surrounded by people my age, and older, dancing with a kind of desperate glee to songs that were revolutionary two and a half decades ago. For a few hours, we could pretend the intervening years of austerity, Brexit, and cultural fragmentation hadn’t happened. It was fun. It was also profoundly sad. Our musical landscape in 2024 feels like that club night, just on a national scale and with a much bigger budget.
An Anthem for the End of an Age
What we are witnessing is the transformation of our entire musical ecosystem into something resembling a heritage industry. It’s like the National Trust for sound, dedicated to the preservation and immaculate presentation of past treasures. Beethoven gets his 250th anniversary tour, Verdi’s masterpieces are revived, grime’s elder statesmen are given their lifetime achievement awards, and indie rock’s most revered figures offer us a subtly different shade of what they gave us before. Each is presented as a singular, vital event. But together, they form a pattern – a collective turning-away from the messy, uncertain, and potentially unprofitable future.
This is not an artistic failure, but a political and economic one. When a nation’s confidence in its own future evaporates, its culture invariably turns inward and backward. The UK today is a country haunted by a sense of its own decline, stalked by division and diminished possibility. In such a climate, the appetite for genuinely disruptive art – art that reflects our chaos back at us, that offers no easy answers, that might not even sell very well – dwindles.
Instead, we crave the reassurance of the five-star review, the comfort of the recognisable melody, the intellectual safety of the acknowledged classic. We are asking our artists not to lead us into the unknown, but to guide us back to the places we already know and love. It is a perfectly understandable human impulse. But it is a cultural death sentence. The sound of 2024 is the beautiful, resonant, and ultimately hollow hum of a culture talking to itself about its own good old days.
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