“Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.” Primal Scream offer a cautionary warning about our troubled world with Deep Dark Waters

Bobby Gillespie
(Image credit: Primal Scream)

Primal Scream have released a second single from their forthcoming 12th album, Come Ahead.

Deep Dark Waters is a cautionary tale exploring colonialism, hardening attitudes towards refugees from war-torn lands, xenophobia, fanaticism, intolerance and political violence, which the band say is holding up a mirror to "the dark undercurrent of our times'.

One verse of the song runs:

"Our fortress continent 
Our values torn and bent 
We bomb and when they run 
We tell them they can’t come
"

In a statement about the song, vocalist Bobby Gillespie says, “Deep Dark Waters is influenced by the writings of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. It contains a warning from history. ‘Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it’.”

Watch a visualiser for the song, directed by Gillespie's former Jesus And Mary Chain bandmate Douglas Hart, below:

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Come Ahead, the follow-up to the band's 2016 album Chaosmosis, will be released on November 8 via BMG. It was recorded in Belfast, London and Los Angeles with Belfast-born producer David Holmes. The album's first single, Love Insurrection, was released last month.

“If there was an overall theme to Come Ahead it might be one of conflict, whether inner or outer,” Gillespie says of the record. “There is a message of hope in the record but it’s tempered with an acceptance of the worst side of human nature.”

“There is also a thread of compassion running through the album. The title is a Glaswegian term. If someone threatens to fight you, you say, ‘Come ahead!’ It’s redolent of the indomitable spirit of the Glaswegian, and the album itself shares that aggressive attitude and confidence.”

Paul Brannigan
Contributing Editor, Louder

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.