Album Review: Antony Szmierek - Service Station at the End of the Universe (Mushroom Music)

Antony Szmierek isn't in the tradition of angry northern men shouting about what Britain took from them. He belongs to the quieter, stranger tradition of artists from the region - those who saw what was there all along. Szmierek started out reading poems in small Manchester venues and gradually found his way toward house and rave. He still sounds like he's talking to you, but now his songs move through embarrassment, hope, and longing, tracking how easily such feelings dissolve in the bad-coffee democracy of post-austerity Britain. On Wednesday, April 8, 2026, the wildly charismatic Mancunian debuts at Control Club.

Szmierek's debut, Service Station at the End of the Universe, is thirty-six minutes set inside a fictional motorway service station on a road called Andromeda Southbound. It's best described on the album's interlude: "This country is divided / But at least all our service stations look the same...Here, I could be anyone / Heartbroken, disgraced, on the run / Wе all look different when we'rе just passing through." A cast of characters, among them a bride-to-be and a bloke described as "the patron saint of Withington" trying his luck with "a pound shop Geri Horner," orbit this fluorescent non-place, until the closer gathers them inside a working men's club for a wedding. The stakes are entirely human-scale, which here feels like the highest scale available, and Szmierek never sands them down into irony.

What distinguishes Szmierek from inevitable comparisons to the Streets is that the service station functions as an epistemology. The pubs and terraces that once anchored British pop's emotional core have now given way to car parks, gentrifier architecture, office space, and motorway bridges. These spaces are where people actually spend their time now, and Szmierek treats them with the same attention. These are Marc Augé's non-lieux (aka non-place) rendered through UKG-adjacent kicks. They're the anonymous spaces that welcome ever-increasing numbers of individuals each day, now stripped of identity, where British life's normal hierarchies briefly dissolve under extraction-fan hum: "Is hope included in this meal deal, or…? / Nah, I didn't think so / The good stuff never is."

Co-produced with Max Rad, Robin Parker, Yves Jones, and Louie Fulford-Smith, the production channels acid house, hip-hop and indie without genuflecting to any one. Szmierek's spoken cadence sits in the mix, surrounded by forward-leaning beats. "Rafters" opens with a single piece of confetti shaken loose by bass, "the ghost of the party the night before." The track builds into a warmth that feels earned through the precision of its imagery. "Take Me There" unfolds like a confessional spoken mid-houseparty. "Yoga Teacher" rides an 80s synth line while Szmierek wrestles with masculinity and an absent father across a surrealist yoga class setting: "I wonder if he has children and if he'd cradle me".

British pop has spent thirty years negotiating the wreckage of Britpop's irony, cycling through the performative bleakness of austerity-era guitar music. Szmierek arrives after it all and chooses sincerity. The interior monologue of the overlooked, delivered with such care that the overlooking itself turns out to be the record's ultimate indictment. Where John Cooper Clarke sharpened Salford diction into punk-satire, and someone like Baxter Dury coats conversational delivery in ironic lacquer, Szmierek lets warmth in first and intelligence follow. When he writes "I want to be a crumb in your bed," the image is absurd, though the tenderness it carries is fully lived in.

This vulnerability carries an underlying political charge that the album never makes explicit, unlike London's socially charged Kae Tempest or Ireland's Meryl Streak. Northern England after austerity is usually represented through an elegiac fury. Think Sleaford Mods' snarl, or the "left behind" narrative's institutional mourning. Service Station refuses both. Its North isn't a wound. It also isn't a museum. Its characters fall in love in clubs and worry about whether they will ever have children. When the phrase "Miserable little England" surfaces, it arrives with the wry observation of someone who lives there and stays rather than someone cataloguing damage from a distance.

The album's center of gravity lies in its nostalgia-soaked climax, "Angie's Wedding." Recorded in an unbroken take, it evokes Orbital's "Belfast," but for a cathedral setting. Szmierek stages his rapture at a buffet. The cosmic vocabulary running through the album finally touches down in the most terrestrial of settings, and the collision produces something genuinely moving. The recognition that these people, these unspectacular convergences, were always the point. "Everything's ironic now, isn't it?" Szmierek asks, mid-track. The answer, across these thirty-six minutes, is a quiet and unequivocal no.