The Streets – ‘The Darker The Shadow, The Brighter The Light’ review: evocative ode to club culture

18 October, 2023

The Streets' Mike Skinner

Recently, it’s when he’s embraced his role as UK dance music’s beneficent elder statesman that Mike Skinner has produced his best work. Co-signing songwriters like Flohio and Oscar #Worldpeace, or spotlighting collaborators like Ms. Banks or Greentea Peng on 2020 mixtape ‘None Of Us Are Getting Out Of This Alive’, he’s shown a knack for spotting talent and a hunger for continual evolution.

Now, Skinner is taking centre stage again, releasing his first full-length album as The Streets since 2011’s Computers and Blues. The vision for ‘The Darker The Shadow, The Brighter The Light’ extends beyond just music; Skinner has also created and starred in an accompanying feature-length film of the same name, a club-centred murder mystery he recently described as “a nightmare” and “an obsession”.

An ode to club culture celebrating Skinner’s decades-long immersion in a lifestyle of dark, sweaty bunkers, throbbing sound systems, and “aching bank accounts”, the album lurches between synth-heavy trap (‘Too Much Yayo’, ‘Someone Else’s Tune’) and thumping bassline (‘Not A Good Idea’, ‘Troubled Waters’). He sketches out an eclectic, bass-driven sound that mirrors his wide-ranging DJ sets, entrenching the sense of lived experience permeating the record.

Skinner’s voice is typically understated and talkative throughout (apart from the odd underwhelming attempt at autotuned singing). He’s mastered the rare skill of penning genuinely funny lyrics that expertly communicate time and place; hooks like “The walk of shame is my daily commute” capture the relentless glare of morning light after a night out, while on ‘Shake Hands With Shadows’, he spits “Shake hands with shadows an hour before dawn / You make plans with morons / You’re powerless to misfortune”, celebrating those special, doomed friendships we forge in the early hours.

With depth and detail, Skinner guides us knowingly through the nightclub experience he’s documented so well on past anthems like ‘Blinded By The Lights’. Given the similarities in title and subject matter, it’s hard to resist comparing that classic to his new record. And while ‘The Darker The Shadow’ is ambitious, packed with witty, insightful commentary on the human experience, its conceptual focus allowing plenty of scope for creative flourishes, it ultimately lacks the incisive punch of his earlier songwriting. The beauty of it is that Skinner, now in his mid-forties, is too busy living life to bother too much about what other people think. As he raps on the record’s pulsating penultimate track ‘Troubled Waters’, “Outside of a nightclub, I don’t know what to do / Inside of a nightclub, it’s too dark to care”.