The thing about songs with titles like “Liberal Anthem” is that you expect them to be bad, or at least unbearably smug, the sort of thing a think-tank would use in a promo video where some smiling intern types “equity” into a whiteboard and everyone claps politely. And yet, against all odds, Polish duo Transgalactica have delivered a track that is not only listenable but sort of exhilarating, in the same way watching someone on Twitter try to summarize Das Kapital in a thread of sorts is exhilarating.
Early listeners compare the guitarwork it to Marillion, which is true if by Marillion you mean “prog-rock that refuses to apologize for its own melodrama,” but Transgalactica condense the excess into something brisker, like they’ve managed to boil the sprawling DNA of prog down into an energy drink. And then, just when you think you’ve got it pegged, the song does a little sleight of hand: a modulation from minor to major, that oldest of tricks, and suddenly everything sounds bigger, brighter, hopeful. They even recycle the first stanza, only now with a Velvet Underground-esque melodic contour borrowed from “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” except instead of Nico’s funereal detachment you get something halfway between a sermon and a pep rally.
And then, the lyrics hit you. On the surface, it’s a call for a “Church of John Stuart Smith” (which, yes, might be a typo, or maybe it’s intentional, or maybe it’s the sort of thing that makes perfect sense at 3 a.m. after too much Wikipedia). The words gesture toward liberal ideals of human dignity, rights for all, a vision of happiness that scales up from the individual to the universal, but the tone, the sheer insistence of it, feels less like “vote Labour and recycle” and more like “we’ve read our Marx and Engels and we’re quietly trying to sneak redistribution into your prog-rock playlist.” The liberal window-dressing is there, sure, but the mood is leftist, or at least “online-leftist-adjacent,” and that distinction only really registers if you spend too much time marinating in The Discourse™.
Because, let’s be honest, if you’re not already knee-deep in arguments about whether liberalism is a doomed compromise with capital or the necessary first step toward socialism, you’re probably just going to hear this as “oh cool, philosophy band wants people to be happy.” And that’s fine! But if you are part of that discourse; if you’ve ever found yourself watching a BreadTube video at 2 a.m, then this song starts to feel like a sly wink, a not-so-subtle hint that what’s being preached isn’t a TED Talk gospel of incrementalism, but something closer to solidarity, redistribution, and collective liberation dressed up in chords and smoke-machine grandeur.
“Liberal Anthem” is oddly compelling: it doesn’t hide behind metaphor, it doesn’t soften its edge with irony, it just barrels forward with sincerity so naked it veers into absurdity, and in doing so, it accidentally becomes more radical than if it had spent five verses couching itself in clever imagery. “Liberal Anthem” is a prog-rock sermon that says, quite plainly, the world could be better, and we should probably do something about that.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
