In Meryl Streek’s caustic song, “Death to the Landlord“, from his first album, 796, the avant-garde punk angrily addresses the politicians in Ireland’s governing bodies in his working-class Dublin accent, “I hope you hear this fucking song / And realize / The next one is going to name every single one of yous.” It was a threat from a singer who shed the various bands he played with for over 15 years and, standing alone, was ready to reveal the lying bureaucrats who had “shed any last piece of decency” and led the working class to a bare life filled with gambling, drink, and suicide. Like many others on that powerful 2022 album, the song was a violent projectile, flying like spit, covering everyone listening.
In Songs for the Deceased, Meryl Streek’s 2024 follow-up, the singer continues to point directly at a few individuals he finds responsible in such songs as “Bertie”, a takedown of Bertie Ahern, the former Irish prime minister accused of taking bribes. Overall, though, the songs do not realize the promise he made in naming the corrupt politicians; instead of an accusatory finger directed at specific villains, the songs are often more general, a middle finger towards a whole class of privileged “wankers” who are pulling the strings, keeping him from living out his dreams.
The result is that Songs for the Deceased does not hit as hard as 796, as the direction of his anger is seemingly dispersed, its lyrics slipping, at times, into generalization. In “The Industry”, he is attacking, among other things, privileged kids who are given soft jobs as influencers in the music scene, keeping him from the stage. In “Interlude”, the song by Meryl Streek and performed with Benefits, enigmatically states that the country is “ruined by the ones who keep on ruining it”. In “The Beginning”, he patches together various news reports and voices over traditional Irish music and synthesizers, culminating in a statement that the blame should be placed on those wearing suits rather than track pants.
Although there are many guests on Songs for the Deceased, including members of Benefits, the Chisel, Vulpynes, and A Place to Bury Strangers, Dan Doherty (Fontaines D.C.) is again the producer, and the themes and musical styles in this album feel familiar. This time, though, the blame is dispersed not onto the few but the many.
Meryl Streek’s generalizing, however, is revelatory and suggests a larger theme that links both albums. He wants on a plate the heads in charge of the Catholic Church, the State, and the music industry because they are all essentially the same thing: landlords. They own his spiritual, economic, and artistic life; he’s just renting it all and finding himself short monthly. He wants to spend his days “drawing pictures”, but he can’t because he does not own any part of his life. “Pricks” surround him, but there are too many of them to name.
This is where, conceptually, Songs for the Deceased becomes fascinating. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of “cunts” who are controlling his life, he lyrically draws them interchangeably with dark featureless splotches. In the album’s best songs, however, he is exacting in his rendering. Instead of naming the landlords, Meryl Streek individually names the victims. In “Terrance”, he tells of a 20-year-old who was falsely accused of a crime by the Garda, killed in jail, and his death covered up by the State. In “The Stardust”, over a static beat with flourishes of simple notes on a keyboard, he names each of the 48 victims of a suspicious 1981 nightclub fire.
These songs are about specific young people who have died, but through sampling news reports and interjecting victim families’ voices, he points to the thousands of people who were touched by the lives of those killed. The naming is a form of remembering not only of the murdered but of the vulnerable bonds between the victims and their loved ones that were severed by these acts of violence. By switching from naming landlords to naming victims, he is growing the circle of anger against the landlord class, which does not need to be individually named because they are only stand-ins for the system of precarity, which is the true force of violence in his life.
Diverging from 796, where he spat out accusations against the church and state with no indication of how to survive these injustices that seep into every aspect of our lives, in Songs for the Deceased, he points out a way to move against the system. In his sentimental song “Paddy”, he speaks about his uncle who “chose not to work” and, with his Marlborough Reds and wine, read his whole life and talked about what he learned to his nephew. With a ragged voice, Meryl Streek praises his uncle, who knew “full well how backward this place was run” and who “chose to play by his own rules” before celebrating him by repeating again and again, “You’ll always be missed / You’ll always be loved.”
Although Songs for the Deceased is angrily vulgar, pointing out the sheer stupidity that keeps the landlords ruling over him, he also shows that an alternative way is possible through remembering and naming his uncle. It’s far from revolutionary and certainly won’t change the system, but by learning the truth and speaking it, his uncle shows that there can be a bit of sanity in a mad world.
In Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves (2021), the journalist places the long history of collusion between the church and state at the center of the nation’s narrative to reveal an Ireland far from its Americanized image of shamrock keychains and spilled pints of Guinness. It’s a narrative of lies by politicians and priests, epitomized by the Magdalene Laundries scandal, but pushed through all sectors of society. Listening to Songs For the Deceased is an excellent companion to this history as it offers a way to feel the ramifications of those lies on the people who live it. Meryl Streek’s albums of rejection of O’Toole’s book title: he knows himself and Ireland and is naming everything he can remember.
In a Manchester gig at the Deaf Institute in November 2024, Meryl Streek begins “Paddy” while off the stage and on the floor in the pitch black, with an occasional flashlight strobing through the darkness as he dedicates the song to his uncle. In these flashes of light, we catch glimpses of the crowd surrounding the singer, the energy building as the people close in. Watching the performance, I kept thinking of Judith Butler’s most recent work on precarity [Precarious Life (2004), Frames of War (2009), and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015)], where she argues that the very essence of being human is our primary vulnerability and dependency of, and to, others.
“Let’s face it,” Butler poetically states in Precarious Life. “We’re undone by each other. And if not, we’re missing something.” Watching those bodies close around Meryl Streek in the flashes of light as he repeats that his uncle will be remembered and loved crystalizes how these vulnerable relations are consistently forming and informing, not only through material bodies in proximity to each other but also through remembering others who we are continually dependent upon as well.
While I find Butler’s above lines beautiful, a threat lurks within her words. We are missing something when we don’t see how others undo us, and in the process of missing it, we are being made into something else. Songs for the Deceased suggests that we often miss realizing the role of the landlord class in our lives, which has removed all forms of security we depend on to live a life worth living.
Again and again, Meryl Streek boasts that he has not missed this fact and is not blind to what is happening to him and others. Angrily, he rejects this life as he responds to the title of his song, “If this is life,” by yelling, “then I don’t want it.” By revealing the class of perpetrators and by naming some of their victims, he is linking vulnerable bodies. These assemblages help form a voice for himself, which he uses to declare, “Fuck you / And take this song with ya.” It’s not a call for a revolution, but it is still revelatory.