ALBUM REVIEW: Dropkick Murphys – For The People (Dummy Luck Music/Play It Again Sam)
After back-to-back acoustic albums reinterpreting the lyrics of Woody Guthrie, Boston, MA’s finest Celtic punk band are back to doing what they do best – loudly standing up for workers’ rights and calling out corporate greed.
This 13th studio album is the first plugged-in DKM record since 2021’s Turn Up That Dial (reviewed here), and the even better news is that Al Barr is back.
The co-vocalist took time out in 2022 to take care of his ailing mother, and wasn’t involved with that year’s This Machine Still Kills Fascists (reviewed here) or 2023’s Okemah Rising (reviewed here).
He only features on one song, The Vultures Circle High, but it’s great to hear him trading lines with Ken Casey in his trademark growl. Barr is but one of a host of special guests here (though it’s odd to describe him as that given he’s still officially a member of the band).
Billy Bragg guests on a cover of Ewan MacColl’s School Days Are Over, while The Mary Wallopers – a sort of DKM-light from Dundalk in Ireland – join them on protest song Bury The Bones.
Dublin band The Scratch, who blend traditional Irish music with heavy metal, appear on two songs, the accordion-soaked Longshot and One Last Goodbye, an affectionate tribute to late Pogues singer Shane MacGowan.
The latter is a fitting end to an album full of the vim and vigour the Murphys built a near-30-year career on before going all acoustic on us for the last couple of records.
Lead single and opening track Who’ll Stand With Us?, powered by a killer riff, is perhaps the best song they’ve written in 10 years. It’s a call for unity, and a look at what – and who – is really dividing us – “the bosses and the bankers, who never gave their share, of any blood, of any sweat, of any tears”.
Casey’s ire is palpable as he sings: The working people fuel the engine, while you yank the chain/We fight the wars and build the buildings, for someone else’s gain, so tell me – who will stand with us?” It’s almost a retread of one of my favourite DKM songs, The Workers Song, from 2003’s Blackout album.
Another standout, The Big Man, is a rollocking tribute to 6ft 4in Pennywise guitarist Fletcher Dragge, who’s just the guy to call “if you need your hotel room wrecked, or a bandmate thrown through a drum set”. The chorus: “He’ll fight the system ’til the day that he dies, he’s the big man from Pennywise,” will go down a storm live.
There’s some more personal songs too: the folky Chesterfields And Aftershave is about Casey’s grandfather, and how he hopes he’d be proud of the man he’s become, while the bagpipes-tinged Streetlights is about his father, who died when the singer was only eight years old.
Elsewhere, there’s plenty of grit in the urgent, self-reflective Kids Games and the Pogues-like Sooner Kill ‘Em First, while Fiending For The Lies is a warning that we’ve got it all wrong over who to trust with our lives and livelihoods.
The two recent acoustic albums certainly divided opinion, and led some to believe that the Dropkick Murphys as we knew and loved them were a busted flush. This album should make the naysayers thing again. 9/10.
- For The People is available now to stream and download, and will be released on CD and LP on October 10, with five extra tracks.
