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Sleaford Mods, the 1975, Fred Again: the songs that sum up each year of Tory government

Dave’s lament for the Grenfell atrocity, Dua Lipa’s bedroom disco for a locked-down nation, Kneecap’s Badenoch-riling rap, Elbow’s hymn for asylum seekers … here are the tracks that defined 14 years of Conservative rule

The rapper absorbed and weaponised prejudices about “council estate kids, scum of the earth”, ripping through austerity, inequality and Boris Johnson’s tenure as London’s mayor: “There’s no such thing as broken Britain / We’re just bloody broke in Britain.” Interpolating riot footage and caricatures of Cameron and Clegg, the video now resembles a high-explosive time capsule. The largest numbers were coming from Syria via Libya, two countries where the hopes of 2011’s Arab Spring had gone up in flames, and Iraq and Afghanistan, legacies of the lethally hubristic War on Terror.The death of two-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi by drowning, during the peak of the crisis in autumn 2015, focused minds, leading to songs like Coldplay’s Aliens and PJ Harvey’s The Camp as well as Wolf Alice’s fundraiser Bands 4 Refugees. On Love It if We Made It, the 1975’s Matty Healy approximated the overwhelming, disempowering sensation of doomscrolling, his anxious brain flitting from Trump to Twitter and Alan Kurdi to Black Lives Matter: “Modernity has failed us.”By contrast,Unknown T stuck to his east London postcode on Homerton B, the defining anthem of UK drill.

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