Hard Times Furious Dancing
Formed in East London in 2011, Snapped Ankles honed their craft at DIY nights and warehouse parties, where they would improvise amid chopped-up 1960s film projections and primitive synth experiments, performing anonymously in shaggy ghillie suits backed with an explosive blend of jagged post-punk and electronic noise, defying convention from the outset. Camouflaged in leaves, antlers, and moss, thrashing on homemade log synths, there has always been a sharp edge beneath the theatrics, grappling with themes of rampant property development and urban gentrification, dressing like woodland spirits and still skewering real-world issues with wit and ire.
Where many bands address environmental anxiety and social unrest, Snapped Ankles stand out by wrapping those messages in mischief and mythology rather than dour sermonising, inviting audiences to dance and chant along while pondering the bands jabs at consumer culture and ecological destruction. They are far more than a novelty act. They’re agitators in disguise, using the absurd to shine a light on the all-too-real.
All of these elements coalesce powerfully on the band’s newest studio album, Hard Times Furious Dancing. The title is a mission statement, and the album channels the turmoil of our present political chaos and economic hardship into a pagan dance party for the end of the world. Guitars take a backseat to buzzing analog synth lines and motorik rhythms, whilst howling about profiteering energy companies and economic injustice, hitting with the direct force of folk slogans or punk chants, delivered over irresistibly pulsating music that transforms anger into sweaty communal joy.
Hard Times Furious Dancing is an invitation to vent our frustrations on the dance floor, and to find hope and release in collective motion. Their concerts feel like immersive rituals with band members leaping into the crowd, homemade instruments, and audiences whipped into a manic, frenzied, ecstatic state.
We caught up with the band to find out more:
Can you tell us about those early days playing in warehouses and how that shaped the band’s identity?
The first spores of Snapped Ankles took root in the cold, damp corners of the last derelict warehouse spaces in East London—before they all mutated into luxury hotels and gleaming voids for offshore wealth. Back then, we had these vast, echoing cathedrals of brick and asbestos where we could rig up lights, projections, and summon a bit of controlled chaos. We formed a collective called London Topophobia—a mix of dancers, filmmakers, performance artists, and electronics wizards—who hosted semi-legal, semi-quiet, totally weird nights of immersive art ritual.
Snapped Ankles first emerged improvising live soundtracks to strange short films, but soon we needed something more… primal. The constraints of the warehouse space—the challenge of installing quick, high-intensity performances—forced us to rethink what a band could be. No stage. No faces. Just a force. A ritual. Something closer to a Jack Parsons firework experiment gone wrong than a “gig.”
Outside of tired labels like ‘post-punk’ and ‘krautrock’, what are some key influences on your performance style?
We’re children of carnivals and occult cabarets. Rock ‘n’ roll theatrics that’ve been soaked in lighter fluid and set ablaze by Jerry Lee Lewis. Iggy Pop hurling himself across broken glass in a divine seizure. Keiji Haino channeling spirits through his delay pedals. James Brown collapsing down to the splits in the ecstatic fury of the funk one and up again on Clyde Stubblefield 3rd ghost note.
There’s also the Chitrali dancers of northern Pakistan—I once witnessed them spiral in circular dances for hours in the Hunza Valley, blurring the line between trance and transcendence. These are all rituals. Sacred, feral and durational like a long night in the land of rave. We want to tap into the same frequencies—the frequencies Anton LaVey might've piped through the walls of the Black House while performing a sex magick rite with a theremin.
So yes, it’s a performance. But it's also a summoning. We aim to conjure as much energy as humanly—and inhumanly—possible. I think do owe a bit of this to CAN who saw each 4hour live performance as a cosmic ritual but for us The Wild Man archetype always rides fast and in your face!
Can you talk about the phrase ‘Hard Times Furious Dancing’ and where it came from?
It’s a phrase from Alice Walker’s book Hard Times Require Furious Dancing—she writes about a wake where grief turns to dancing, and the people form a line of catharsis. That image stuck with us. In these apocalyptic end-stage-capitalism days—wars, ecological ruin, billionaires joyriding into the stratosphere—it feels more vital than ever.
Dance becomes protest. A furious resistance. A writhing, ecstatic denial of the void. And for us, creating more dancefloor-oriented music was a natural evolution—if the ship’s sinking, we might as well throw the most unholy rave the world’s ever seen. Think of it as disco for doomsday.
The new album leans more into dance and electronic elements than your previous records. What inspired this move?
Honestly? Practicality. Survival. The groove has always been central to Snapped Ankles—rituals need rhythm—but we wanted to make it feel like a rave held by forest-dwelling cultists who’ve only read about raves in crumbling magazines left behind by the Crass obsessed punks.
We took over MOT club in London—a rave bunker notorious for long weekends of DONK and delirium. With the band thrown into the middle of the space, deconstructing our songlike demos and rebuilding them in a fog of strobes, lasers, and barely contained entropy. It was part Dionysian cult, part Jack Parsons rocket test. The idea was: what if pagan wood spirits got hold of a sequencers and a surround sound PA system?
What do you hope to achieve at a Snapped Ankles show?
That moment at MOT. When the room becomes a blur. When the air gets too thick to breathe. When you forget your name but remember how to move. When it feels like you’re not at a gig, but at a séance conducted by malfunctioning synths.
That’s the goal.
How does it feel to bring the show to such bigger festival crowds after coming up in the underground circuit?
Festival crowds are a different beast. Often, they’ve just been snacking on plastic pints and stodgy churros and worried about the toilet queue. So we have to go in all logs blazing—we don’t ease in, we invade!
We just closed Glastonbury playing the last set of the entire weekend at 4AM in Shangri-La. At first, it was dead quiet between tracks—I thought we were tanking—but through the strobes, I could see a huge hoard heads downs dancing. They weren’t talking, They were just dancing. Trance-mode activated. That’s when you know the spell’s working.
Do you see crowds reacting to the political commentary, or are they mostly there for a mad dance?
Both. And that’s the beauty of it. If people want to scream into the void about Palestine, Ukraine, the cost-of-living death spiral—good. If they want to do it with their hips and sweat and a gurn —even better.
Protest has always been rhythmical—drums in the forests, chants in the squares, techno on the barricades. If the system is collapsing, we might as well write our manifestos together on the dancefloor.
What does the songwriting process look like? Do you jam grooves, or start with concepts, or build around sounds from your unusual instruments?
It’s all composted together in the woods. We jam late night grooves. We dream up strange sonic spells from snippets of the past. Sometimes we get too excited and overcook it—too much fizz, not enough ritual. So we strip it back and try again….
On this record, we took the tracks on the road for six months, tested them in the wild, then returned to the studio ( this time with MALCOLM CATTO of the Heliocentrics). We don't write songs. We grow them. Like moss. Or like those weird fungal colonies that can solve mazes.
And let’s face it—since hardly anyone buys records anymore, we only survive through live performance. So every track must be designed to summon bodies. Preferably into a clearing. Preferably at night under a green laser beam!
Why is fun such an important ingredient when talking about such serious issues?
Because you can’t chant slogans with a mouth full of ashes.
Because if you’re going to dance on the edge of the abyss, you might as well dance well. We’re called Snapped Ankles—we write songs for people mid-collapse, both literally and spiritually. We laugh into the void. And then we groove.
What is the ultimate goal of Snapped Ankles?
To locate an unpolluted water source, commune with the last remaining ancient woodland, and ride out the apocalypse with a LogSynth, a solar generator, and a DIY rocket engine built from Jack Parsons’ old notebooks.