Tekst: Chloé Perrin
Foto: Artwork banner: Roy van Wezenbeek
NO FUTURE
I happen to be the nostalgic type. I feel like nothing new has started since I was born at the end of the 1980s, nothing as groundbreaking, as paradigm-shifting as punk, surrealism, or techno. My anxiety is too high to pretend I genuinely don’t care about the future, but I can’t get really interested—I can’t imagine it, worse, I can’t fancy it, but it is haunting me in the shape of a million pending apocalypses. I feel like the 20th century hasn’t died, that the 21st never really started, or that it was stillborn, maybe, and that we are all stuck inside this miscarriage. This can’t be just me and my neuroses, not when all the festival headliners are way past their prime, when millennials are force-fed endless revivals—grunge, emo, unimaginative-retro-rock-of-the-2010s rebranded as “indie sleaze”—, and when movie theaters are saturated with remakes, spin-offs, and franchises squeezed way past their last drop. Isn’t it getting insulting after a while? Since I was a teenager, I’ve been waiting for something to happen. Maybe that’s where it went wrong.
Talking with an older friend, I admit: “Maybe my generation was so busy waiting for something to happen that we forgot that we were the ones who had to do it.” We heard so much about the wonders of the 1960s-70s-80s-90s, about the bleakness of our future, that we collectively believed it. We copied the songs and the outfits of our elders instead of telling them to fuck off, and politically, I can’t remember a single protest in my teens that wasn’t tainted by the overwhelming weight of May 68, a sense of uncertainty—“Are we doing this properly?” Times were indeed different; we did lose many things along the way, neoliberalism tore our world and our time apart: that’s why we create such a quantity of cultural blankies reminding us of good old days we never experienced.
That’s one of the suggestions British writer Simon Reynolds makes in Retromania1, a book about “pop culture’s addition to its own past.” Even though it was released fifteen years ago, it still feels sharp and contemporary. Reynolds addresses the cultural and political climate, but most of his points revolve around technology, from hauntology to record collecting. With the boom of the internet at the turn of the millennium, something massive was unleashed: its limitless archival power. If recorded music plunged us into a world of ghosts, flooded with voices of the dead, now, this oppressive weight of the past is constant and pervasive. We might be caught in its grip: people from the generation of Reynolds describe a sense of loss, of “nothing new,” and people from my generation feel stuck in an undefinable space-time, a perpetual past-present more akin to the experience of a hamster in a wheel than that of the timeless time of the Golden Age. In an article for E-flux, Mark Fisher summarized the situation like this: “both politically and aesthetically, it seems that we can now only expect more of the same, forever.”2
Mark Fisher, a British philosopher who is still dearly missed after his suicide in 2017, explains what he means by that, and what he got from Reynolds’ book, in a lecture that is still available on YouTube. It is entitled “The slow cancellation of the future,”3 and it is more or less the introduction to his book Ghosts of my Life4. In this lecture, Fisher talks about temporal pathologies, about the fact that time’s very nature changed. That it started to flow weirdly, or not at all; that it is full of loops and hiccups, of strange synchronicities, of spectacular distortions, of glitches and locked grooves. The symptoms of these pathologies are varied: life has sped up, culture has slowed down, the sense of historicity has waned, culture isn’t associated with a specific period anymore, boredom has disappeared. The causes are many—ubiquity of the cyberspace, collapse of social democracy—and the result is the same: “No one is bored. Everything is boring.” The means of creating something genuinely new have slipped out of our hands.
In 2025, Adam Curtis produced Shifty5, a documentary for the BBC. It is as haunted by Mark Fisher (his takes on hauntology, on capitalist realism, on lost futures) as our time is haunted by the Thatcher era; this is actually what it shows through footage of the 1980s-90s, juxtaposition, and laconic but cutting commentary. No need for a voice, for the images are loud. Thatcher and Nixon’s attempts at myth-making caught eerily well despite the utter and almost immediate failure of neoliberal policies; as a result, it made everything feel counterfeit. The big crisis that we’re all expecting—fretfully and/or impatiently—isn’t coming: it has already happened, and we live in the afterimage of what was before, in neoliberalism’s huge, rotting body that is decomposing under our very eyes, hence the ghosts. Time isn’t the only thing that is sick: reality is, too; it is shifty, and that explains the pervasive feeling of drowsiness. Familiar records branded as new (“there is no alternative,” free market = freedom, wealth will trickle down) have been spinning forever—well, for a few decades, at least.
Industry, a band “from Berlin but not German,” makes music that sounds like it could have been released in the 1980s, and stacked in the same crates as Icons of Filth, Conflict, and even Killing Joke records. But does it, really? Sure, all the elements are there, but with an edge and a desperation that feel absolutely contemporary: we are still stuck there, in the same manipulated, shifty reality. The same causes—neoliberalism grinding us down to a pulp—create the same consequences—rumbly bass lines and slogan-like lyrics. Fighting the same issues with the same weapons may sound bound to fail (again), but Industry excels at unearthing the best of them and sharpening them into renewed efficiency. Their music is as decluttered as their ideology, a lean, radical anarchism headbutting the state and calling for working class unity; it is dangerously danceable, the first step in setting things into motion. On “Secondhand Future” from their recent self-titled album6, they, too, express this now-familiar unease, this impression that the future has been pulled from beneath our feet and that we’re condemned to stumble down forever… Unless something drastic is done.
Maybe the gravitational pull of the Thatcher era could be located there: at the core of punk, in the two black-hole dark words of “No Future.” Turns out it wasn’t just a call-to-arms, the pinnacle of nihilism, or even a wish: it was a prophecy.
No Future is also a Swedish band that carefully circles around this black hole, never falling into it: they play proto- and post-punk, but avoid 1977. It’s been existing in a nebulous state for about a decade, and released its first album in 2025 as well7. No streaming, no teasing, almost no online presence: until recently, the only way to listen to the record was simply to get it—an experience pretty much obsolete in itself. But “No Future” isn’t a retro band. It doesn’t aim to bring us back into the past; it exhumes, through some kind of necromancy, whole sections of it, and completely distorts the course of time. The first tracks written by the band sounded like dark, ancestral punk à la Birthday Party, but on No Future, their style evolved into an ageless, limitless, almost liquid psychedelic punk: the songs are deep and shimmering like a lake, flowing with dreamlike logic, haunted by a distant voice full of echoes. “Poor Moon,” which closes the album, is a remarkably ghostly cover of Canned Heat, bluesy, dusty, and sounding like it actually preceded the version of the American band. Time is so bent backward that it is rendered irrelevant. “There’s a future for No Future,” said one member of the band in an interview a couple of years ago, when asked about its prospects. More than a good word, more than an accidental but surprisingly apt social commentary, this might be a prophecy again, a way to get us all out of the rut: only by embracing the fact that our future has been canceled, we’ll be able to invent a way out of the past.
