Adrian Flanagan, Dean Honer and Lias Saoudi – share a new single today titled “Roustabout”, a third preview of their long-awaited second album No Rocket Required, out April 25 on Transgressive Records.
“Roustabout”, with Nadine Shah, is a yearning, gothic duet, the Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue two-way for our times. The accompanying music video sees the band collaborate with “The Sign of A Man” director Jeanie Crystal again for another brilliant video.
Seven long years have passed since The Moonlandingz first crash-landed from Valhalla Dale, a semi-fictional band conjuring sticky, squelchy pop for a world reeling from Brexit and Trump’s ascension. With their 2017 debut Interplanetary Class Classics, they roped in an eclectic cast—Yoko Ono, Sean Ono Lennon, Rebecca Taylor, Phil Oakey, and even the Cowboy from The Village People—to soundtrack the chaos with an equal measure of solace and punishment. It was the right album for the wrong times. Now, after years of radio silence, The Moonlandingz are back—not when we wanted them, but exactly when we need them—howling into the void atop their apocalyptic steeds.
Their long-awaited return, No Rocket Required, is a delirious fever dream of brassy squawks, motorik convulsions, and sinisterly soothing vocals, bolstered by an unruly lineup of guest vocalists. Nadine Shah, Iggy Pop, Jessica Winter, and Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner lend their voices to the madness, alongside frontman Johnny Rocket—better known as Lias Saoudi of Fat White Family—who slithers between personas with gleeful abandon. On lead single “Give Me More,” he channels the R. Whites Lemonade drinker in a sleazy, wobbly croon, while on the sprawling “Krack Drought Suite,” he morphs into a northern Kris Kristofferson, dispensing cryptic wisdom from a Huddersfield barstool. His turn with Nadine Shah on “Roustabout” is especially potent, a gravelly duet dripping with doomed romance and cabaret sleaze. And is that him, vocodered into oblivion with a delightfully shonky German accent on the album’s closing techno freakout? One can only hope.
Perhaps the most unexpectedly tender moment arrives with “It’s Where I’m From,” a gently jazzy reverie where Iggy Pop, that eternal punk elder, offers a moment of raw vulnerability. ‘Won’t someone put their arms around me, I cannot take the pain of those who’ve gone,’ he pleads, his voice bearing the same weighty grandeur as late-era Johnny Cash or Scott Walker. It’s an appeal for human connection, a quiet heart at the center of the album’s riotous storm.
No Rocket Required is brimming with ideas, careening through genres and moods with wild, cosmic abandon. Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer, the mad scientists at its core, have crafted something that feels at once immense and intimate—Carl Sagan contemplating the garish carpets of a sticky-floored town-center nightclub.
But what now? As we shuffle through the wreckage, watching bodies, homes, and lives erased while our so-called leaders mutter platitudes and raise our bus fares, what’s left for us? Dance, of course. And connection. And, crucially, resistance. The Moonlandingz offer all three in reckless, sweaty abundance. We need to organize, to fight, to collaborate, and to dance—always to dance. And in No Rocket Required, The Moonlandingz are here to lead the charge, arms flailing, eyes ablaze, urging us ever onward.
Photo credit: Rachel Lipsitz
