Scottish duo Arab Strap on their internet-themed album I'm Totally Fine With It 👍 Don't Give a F*** Anymore 👍

Malcolm Middleton (l) and Aiden Moffat. Photo: Supplied

“It’s a sort of paradox: the idea of community, but everyone’s talking about themselves. There’s very rarely a genuine sense of community in these things. Certainly not on social media.”

Aiden Moffat has strong feelings about life online. In fact Arab Strab’s latest album, (their second since returning from a 15-year break in 2021), is largely concerned with the way the internet has divided people, rather than bringing them together.

The duo’s initial run, from 1995 to 2006, was fueled by stories of excess and sex, but their second act has found focus elsewhere, and on I’m Totally Fine With It 👍 Don’t Give a F*** Anymore 👍, the web provides scaffolding for stories about what Moffat has described as “Thatcher’s dream”.

“It’s true you know”, he says, “Thatcher famously said there’s no such thing as society, and everyone is their own responsibility, and that’s definitely what the internet seems to breed and teach. 

“The most innocuous thing can turn into a battle. But in another sense it’s Thatcher’s dream because it’s mostly about selling you stuff, and harvesting data, and spying on you.” 

On the song ‘Turn Off the Light’, its protagonist finds comfort in online conspiracies, shunning friends and family in the process. When Moffat sings “You came and made sense of it all”, we understand it’s tragic, but the music, with soaring guitar and synths from Malcolm Middleton, is downright triumphant. 

“The lyrics are a response to the music a lot of the time,” he says.

“Certainly in an emotional sense. 

“I don’t write lyrics before we have music. That big finish [on ‘Turn Off the Light’] was always part of the song. Knowing where it’s going is, hopefully, why the music and lyrics gel so well.”

Elsewhere, ‘Safe and Well’ tells the story of someone dying at home, alone during the pandemic. “It’s really about the lie of everyone being connected.” says Moffat. “It sounded like an old folk song, so I wanted to write a modern one.”

‘Allatonceness’ articulates the overwhelming nature of being online, as does ‘Sociometer Blues’, on which Moffat describes his device as “the worst friend I ever had”, over cascading drum fills. 

“It has a sort of chaos to it, that one, it raps you around the head a wee bit.”

One of the more moving tracks is called ‘Haven’t You Heard’, which Moffat says is about “the pressures on young people".

“It’s the same things we had to deal with when we were young, but it’s amplified now.

“It’s taken from young people I know. It can be a very hard world to navigate. The biggest difference is the obvious online aspect. It’s very difficult to escape your mistakes, and your idiotic behaviour. That’s a very important part of being young, you know?”

“It’s become natural to them”, says Middleton. “Kids these days, they don’t think twice about that stuff.”

“The way it’s used as a tool to intimidate I find quite worrying”, says Moffat.

"There were always bullies when I was young, but there’s a bigger arsenal for it now. It’s more insidious, and more focused on mental health. They have bigger, more universal tools”.

The song’s bridge finds him voicing support for the younger generation, singing “We’ll be beside you/ Don’t let zealots and fools divide you”.

“It’s my apology for leaving a world of horror for young people to grow up in”, he says.

“It’s a bit of middle-age guilt, in the line ‘sorry for the mess, we were trying our best.’

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel like the good guys are winning.” 

The song continues, “Burn this hateful world to the ground/ Warm your hearts in its raging flames”, the kind of unfiltered lyric Moffat specialises in. 

On ‘Bliss’, which describes the misogyny women can face online, he sings about “faceless brutes and bigots, revealing all their boyhood fears”, concluding, “We built another world, but history and hate prevail.”

Moffat confesses to having been “totally addicted” to fighting on X, specifically “that feeling when you feel you’ve composed the perfect tweet to put someone down, the perfect response.

“You walk away thinking ‘I own this’. It’s just nonsense. It’s utter bollocks. I was spending far too much of my time arguing with strangers.  

“I was being manipulated by social media itself. Its whole purpose is to keep you engaging, to keep you arguing. The whole currency of Twitter [X] is argument.  

“It didn’t start that way, but that’s what it became after 10, 15 years. So, I just sort of realised I had better things to do with my time.”

“It’s a bit of a blessing though,” says Middleton.

“If he's arguing with strangers online, he’s not sending me angry texts that I’m taking ages to compose something.”