Album artwork for Serfs Up! by Fat White Family
Album artwork for Serfs Up! by Fat White Family

Serfs Up! is Fat White Family’s third album and their first for new label Domino. It marks the most gratifying and unexpected creative volte face in recent musical history. Having released their second album, Songs For Our Mothers in January 2016, core-members Lias and Nathan Saoudi relocated to Sheffield and set about writing the album. Joined by co-conspirator Saul Adamczewski and recorded at their own Champzone studios in the Attercliffe area of the city, Serfs Up! was finished in late autumn 2018 with the help of long-time collaborator, Liam D. May and features a guest appearance from Baxter Dury on Tastes Good With The Money.

Serfs Up! is a lush and masterful work, lascivious and personal. Tropical, sympathetic and monumental. It invites the listener in rather than repel them through wilful abrasion. Fat White Family have broken previous default patterns of behaviour, and as such their third album heralds a new day dawning.

Gregorian chants, jackboot glam beats, string flourishes, sophisticated and lush cocktail exotica, electro funk and the twin spirits of Alan Vega and Afrika Bambaataa punctuate the record at various junctures, while the dramatic production of Feet is as immaculately-rendered as Hounds of Love - era Kate Bush. The dirt is still there of course, but scrape it away and you’ll find a purring engine, gleaming chrome.

Echoing within the arrangements throughout are traces of blissed-out 60s Tropicalia, Velvets / Bowie sleaze-making and star-gazing, 80s digital dancehall, David Axelrod-style easy listening, joyous Pet Shop Boys synth crescendos, acid house, post-PIL dub, metropolitan murder ballads, doom-disco and mouth-gurning, slow-mo psychedelia so by the time it comes to a close only a fool would deny that Serfs Up! is something very special. No longer is unadulterated music malevolence Fat White Family’s stock in trade; this is cultivated music for the head, the heart. For tomorrow’s unborn children.

Where once they soundtracked a grubby Britain of vape shops, Fray Bentos dinners and blackened tin-foil, a crepuscular comedown realm stalked by Shipman, Goebbels and Mark E. Smith, Fat White Family now inhabit another cosmos entirely. Serfs Up! is the product of a band of outlaws reborn. Few but themselves could have forecast it: Fat White Family survived. Fat White Family got wise. Fat White Family got sophisticated.

LP - Heavyweight Black Vinyl with Poster and Download.

LP+ - Limited Heavyweight Gold Coloured Vinyl with Poster and Download.

CD - Housed in Capacity Wallet with Poster.

Tape - Limited White Shell Cassette in Cello-Wrapped Clear Plastic Outer Case with Six Panel Inlay and Download.

Fat White Family

Serfs Up!

Domino
Album artwork for Serfs Up! by Fat White Family
Tape

£10.99

Limited White Shell Cassette in Cello-Wrapped Clear Plastic Outer Case with Six Panel Inlay and Download.

Released 19/04/2019Catalogue Number

WIGMC401

Learn more
Album artwork for Serfs Up! by Fat White Family
LP

£24.99

Heavyweight Black Vinyl with Poster.

Black
Includes download code
Released 19/04/2019Catalogue Number

WIGLP401

Learn more
Album artwork for Serfs Up! by Fat White Family
CD

£14.99

Housed in Capacity Wallet with Poster

Released 19/04/2019Catalogue Number

WIGCD401

Learn more
Fat White Family

Serfs Up!

Domino
Album artwork for Serfs Up! by Fat White Family
Tape

£10.99

Limited White Shell Cassette in Cello-Wrapped Clear Plastic Outer Case with Six Panel Inlay and Download.

Released 19/04/2019Catalogue Number

WIGMC401

Learn more
Album artwork for Serfs Up! by Fat White Family
LP

£24.99

Heavyweight Black Vinyl with Poster.

Black
Includes download code
Released 19/04/2019Catalogue Number

WIGLP401

Learn more
Album artwork for Serfs Up! by Fat White Family
CD

£14.99

Housed in Capacity Wallet with Poster

Released 19/04/2019Catalogue Number

WIGCD401

Learn more

Serfs Up! is Fat White Family’s third album and their first for new label Domino. It marks the most gratifying and unexpected creative volte face in recent musical history. Having released their second album, Songs For Our Mothers in January 2016, core-members Lias and Nathan Saoudi relocated to Sheffield and set about writing the album. Joined by co-conspirator Saul Adamczewski and recorded at their own Champzone studios in the Attercliffe area of the city, Serfs Up! was finished in late autumn 2018 with the help of long-time collaborator, Liam D. May and features a guest appearance from Baxter Dury on Tastes Good With The Money.

Serfs Up! is a lush and masterful work, lascivious and personal. Tropical, sympathetic and monumental. It invites the listener in rather than repel them through wilful abrasion. Fat White Family have broken previous default patterns of behaviour, and as such their third album heralds a new day dawning.

Gregorian chants, jackboot glam beats, string flourishes, sophisticated and lush cocktail exotica, electro funk and the twin spirits of Alan Vega and Afrika Bambaataa punctuate the record at various junctures, while the dramatic production of Feet is as immaculately-rendered as Hounds of Love - era Kate Bush. The dirt is still there of course, but scrape it away and you’ll find a purring engine, gleaming chrome.

Echoing within the arrangements throughout are traces of blissed-out 60s Tropicalia, Velvets / Bowie sleaze-making and star-gazing, 80s digital dancehall, David Axelrod-style easy listening, joyous Pet Shop Boys synth crescendos, acid house, post-PIL dub, metropolitan murder ballads, doom-disco and mouth-gurning, slow-mo psychedelia so by the time it comes to a close only a fool would deny that Serfs Up! is something very special. No longer is unadulterated music malevolence Fat White Family’s stock in trade; this is cultivated music for the head, the heart. For tomorrow’s unborn children.

Where once they soundtracked a grubby Britain of vape shops, Fray Bentos dinners and blackened tin-foil, a crepuscular comedown realm stalked by Shipman, Goebbels and Mark E. Smith, Fat White Family now inhabit another cosmos entirely. Serfs Up! is the product of a band of outlaws reborn. Few but themselves could have forecast it: Fat White Family survived. Fat White Family got wise. Fat White Family got sophisticated.

LP - Heavyweight Black Vinyl with Poster and Download.

LP+ - Limited Heavyweight Gold Coloured Vinyl with Poster and Download.

CD - Housed in Capacity Wallet with Poster.

Tape - Limited White Shell Cassette in Cello-Wrapped Clear Plastic Outer Case with Six Panel Inlay and Download.