With awareness and care for the sensitivity of the topic stating “it’s important not to turn away from these things,” indie band Modern Nature’s new single “Source” touches on the recent riots in the UK directed towards asylum seekers and skewers misinformation spread online.
Modern Nature announced their new album The Heat Warps, due out August 29 via Bella Union, it is a deceivingly encouraging collection through which Jack Cooper – the band’s main creative force – continues to explore themes of collectivism, our relationship with the natural world, the weight of consciousness with more directness and purpose.
Jack shares, “’Source’ was written in the aftermath of the 2024 UK riots, which were sparked by a campaign of misinformation aimed at asylum seekers. I found myself watching live streams of them unfolding on YouTube, despairing at what I was seeing but oddly gripped. These communities are like the one I grew up in. It’s easy to condemn them and of course their actions were appalling, yet amongst all that hate, you could see people desperate for community and collectivism. I wanted to write something about how I saw it and it turned into this strangely uplifting song in the vein of ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ or the Beta Band’s ‘Dry The Rain’. I was going to send it to Liam Gallagher but then Oasis reformed…”
In the time Modern Nature has been a band, the world has undoubtedly changed. For all the grimmer realities of 2025 that the new album wrestles with, it is ultimately not a record entirely consumed by anxieties. Jack Cooper explains, “Every day we’re confronted with a confusing and scary world. Making music and creating things can sometimes feel flippant or unnecessary, but my own world view was defined and influenced by art and artists who weren’t afraid to highlight and offer solutions: Public Enemy, The Smiths, and a wider American counterculture.” The refreshingly optimistic record’s themes and lyrics are directed toward the community they’ve built in their immediate life and with their fans who are “struggling to reconcile how they fit into an increasingly cruel world.” It acts as a siren call to the community to double down with the hope that making an album that’s open, uplifting and ambitious is in itself can be part of the solution.
The Heat Warps features the core trio of Jack Cooper (vocals, guitar), Jim Wallis (drums) and Jeff Tobias (bass guitar) augmented by a new guitarist – Tara Cunningham.
