Observation is the name of the game in an information age where anxiety is wired to supple brains in binary form and Salford-based synth-punk poet, poor effort, returns to tell the story with “talking mouth (on & on)“. Bringing the minimum fuss mantra to a maximum fuss era, the track goes heavy on the bass and lo-fi electro melodies as wordsmith, Matty Dagger lays on laconic takes on the age of digitally-boosted individualism.
Lifted from a debut EP, now confirmed for release on Fri 3 October 2025 on emergent Manchester new music label, Home Taping – in partnership with EMI North – poor effort’s latest single follows June’s lauded “City Of Hope”. A frenetic rush of scratchy machine percussion, barbed wire guitar lines and feint damnation of ultra capitalist regeneration.
This time around, “talking mouth (on & on)” addresses the chaos of communication overload, with due self-awareness of nobody being entirely free of the scourge of self-interest and how “conclusion arrives before irony does in the slow death of nuance.”
Working purposely with tempo as a mood-shifting mechanism, and echoing the same real-yet-playful urbanism of The Streets, Sleaford Mods and early Gorillaz, “talking mouth (on & on)” stays true to the poor effort formula of communication by entertainment and grit with a grin. Writing with intent in isolation before taking tracks to the studio for completion, Dagger’s experimental approach is assisted by his night owl tendencies and insight into air-pushing sonics.
Dagger says of the single:
“At first ‘talking mouth’ was a lot faster and more of a thrashy garage punk song, but I struggled to get the chorus to feel right at that pace. I slowed the tempo down and found that this let it breathe a lot more while still maintaining its distinct drive. The synth melody and sequencers then transformed the nature of the song completely. The initial recordings are still lying around somewhere, maybe I’ll put them on the bonus compilation in 2050.”
Nick Jackson
