Working hard or hardly working? The last few years have been a bit of both. In the spring of 2020 Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom (of Canadian garage-folk band The Burning Hell) released an album of contemporary labour songs called Never Work, and were just getting ready to head out on the road when… well, you know what happened next.

There was a sort of cosmic irony in a tour about the precarious nature of work being derailed by the complete impossibility of work, and the last few years have only brought the album’s themes into even sharper relief. Accenting the acoustic elements of old-school folk revivals with electronic interference, Never Work takes cues from labour activists and Situationist pranksters to explore the gig economy, side-hustles, tech feudalism, class war, unionized digital assistants, rebellious self-service checkout machines, and fully automated luxury communism. Simultaneously earnest and wry, the songs on Never Work are a protest playlist for our collective journey towards oblivion or the beach.

In 2024 Ariel and Mathias teamed up with Manitoba indie rocker and visual artist Jimmie Kilpatrick to finally tour the album, resulting in a sold-out tour through the UK. Imagining themselves as anthropologists from the future studying our current labour practices, the Never Work show collects the songs of Never Work with material from the collaborative EP Hardly Working for a rollicking adventure through the gig economy. Featuring the robot drummer Pepper, Never Work is being revisited for two shows only!