Wake Up, Shut Up, Work
In troubled times, we need artists who will shine a light in the dark, and Millie Manders is emerging as a voice of her generation. Her excellent second album, Wake Up, Shut Up, Work, released on 2 August, is exactly the kind of tonic we need right now. It’s chock-full of ideas, opinions and huge hooks, marinated in teeth-rattling riffs and ska-tinged punk, led by Millie’s huge, emotive, clarion vocal.
“When I’m writing, it has to come from my gut,” she says. “Things that trigger me one way or another emotively is how I write. All of it is geared towards something that has angered me, upset me, or made me feel like I need to speak.”
Outspoken, potty-mouthed, funny and refreshingly frank, it’s an album that tackles mental health and women’s rights, and nails how hard it is just to exist as a citizen of planet earth in 2024. “There are songs about feeling like you’re absolutely insane, literally sitting inside your brain and looking outside of your skull going, I don’t know if I can escape this. There’s some about mental health and there’s a song about me being so shit poor that I can barely afford to eat.”
Notably, the album puts the female experience to the forefront, specifically the empowerment that comes from personal growth and self-discovery. The deceptively playful track Rebound was inspired by a toxic relationship. “I think this is the case for most women,” says Millie. “We allow ourselves to be used and abused, to be gaslit, to be love bombed. We accept our fate because we so want to be accepted and treated as we deserve to be. I got so sick of being that rebound, and it happened several times.” She describes the track as “healing” and “catharsis”. “Rebound is my contract for myself,” she continues. “Putting it on paper for me means I will never be someone’s rebound again.”
That realisation of self-worth is a driver throughout the album. “We’ve got a song called Fun Sponge,” Millie explains. “I researched many different variants of party pooper, but it was also a piss take of when women get enraged and we’re told we are the vacuum in the room, even if our feelings are valid.”
Elsewhere, Me Too explores the culture of victim blaming and shame that infects conversations on sexual assault with the lyric: “Make her feel like she’s the one on trial / They say that she had tempted him / Said; ‘Asking for it, weren’t you though?’” Despite the song’s titular global movement, in 2024 less than 2% of rape victims in the UK ever get justice in a court. “For people who have been raped or abused, I want them to know that they’re not weak and it wasn’t their fault,” says Millie. “And even if they didn’t get justice, they’ve been heard.”
A staunch vegan and advocate for trans rights and women’s rights, the singer saw an opportunity to address the ongoing issue of gender inequality across all aspects of the music industry. She made it her mission to hire as many women as possible across the project: Claire Sutton, the lead singer and guitarist of pop-rock band, All Ears Avow, took on production, mixing and mastering duties.
“I have got women playing sax and trumpet and violin and cello,” says Millie. “Our next tour is going to have a woman photographer and sound engineer. In alternative music there isn’t enough space for non-cis male people. I want to give opportunity to women, trans women and people that aren’t cis male in a part of the industry that is very male dominated.”
Another track on the album that stands out is Can I Get Off?, a blistering tirade against the multiple “genocidal” conflicts happening across the world, and which unapologetically outlines Millie’s stance on the current Israeli–Palestinian conflict: “Do you feel uncomfortable? / How do you think the Gazans feel while they’re still being bombed? / Am I siding with Hamas? You’re going to ask that one again?”
“I was desperately frightened putting that song in, but I didn’t have a choice,” says Millie. “I’ve had a lot of backlash for advocating for Palestine. I’ve lost friends, I’ve lost followers, I’ve lost fans, I lost a booking agent. But I want people to know that being confident in your political standing, and standing up for other people is right and brave. If you’re still not speaking about it, you’re a fucking coward.”
To write the album, Millie and her band, The Shut Up, decamped to an Air BNB in Norfolk, where they shut themselves off from the world. “We weren’t allowed our phones between 9:00am and 4:00pm,” Millie remembers. “We didn’t allow ourselves to contact our significant others until after we’d finished work every day.”
Each member of the band brought a new flavour to the table. “The lyricism and the melody is always mine. I’m very protective of that,” says Millie, who adds that the influence of everyone from Pink and Creeper to Rage Against the Machine, K-Pop, The Specials and the poetry of Scroobius Pip has seeped into the record’s sound. “But to be able to release the reins a little bit sonically was exciting. George is my bassist and her bass lines are really funky. My drummer, Pete Wright, has got the biggest record collection I’ve ever bloody seen. He loves everything from weird soft, folky music, to walls of noise where you can’t hear a damn thing. I’m sitting in rooms with these people who have vastly different understanding of what it is to be eclectic in music and I think that you’ve got some real twists in there that vary from the previous album.”
The sessions came after a long period during which the singer had struggled creatively. She puts the three-year gap between Wake Up, Shut Up, Work and her debut, Telling Truths, Breaking Ties, down to the frantic promotion schedule for the latter, which was released during the pandemic. But Wake Up, Shut Up, Work however finds her refreshed, with a renewed love for music and a revived sense of passion and purpose. “I’m really excited about album three now,” she enthuses. “I haven’t even put out album two and I’m like, let’s do it. Let’s go.”
LINE-UP: Millie Manders – Vocals, guitar, alto sax | Joe Quigley – guitar | George Boreham – bass | Pete Wright – drums, samples
DISCOGRAPHY: Telling Truths, Breaking Ties (2020)
