MMXII (Killing Joke album)

MMXII is a dense and dark end-of-time album that explores the 2012 phenomenon with political, anti-capitalist and forward-looking themes, which is also able to find moments of optimism and hope, and positive light in the fields of environmentalism, reforestation, permaculture[5] and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.[3][4] The industrial rock album's compositions are characterized by Walker's guitar riffs, Youth's warm and vibrant bass guitar, Fergusson's impeccable timing and by Coleman's sweet harmonies mixed with rants.[6]

The opening track of the album, "Pole Shift", is about environmental concerns and the possibility and the need of a potentially rapid shifts in the relative positions of the geographic locations of the poles and the axis of rotation of the Earth.[3][7] This nine-minute track, which starts with a cascading symphony made up by electric bass guitar and synthesizers, is marked by Walker's guitar scaling and Coleman's mix of introspectively delivered verses and dark chorus.[8] The second track, "Fema Camp", is a five-minute song with tribal rhythms and incendiary vocals that was inspired by the prison-like facilities built around the United States by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that could be used during martial law for the internment of citizens who are deemed a threat to U.S. national security.[3][4][8]

"Rapture", the third track on the album and the first song that was made available for free listening, is Coleman's vision of Killing Joke's concerts, comparing them to a spiritual experience. The song, arranged in the industrial metal music style of their 2006's album Hosannas from the Basements of Hell, was inspired by Fela Kuti and his Kalakuta Republic commune in Nigeria.[3][7][4] The fourth track, "Colony Collapse", deals with the current global situation and its prospects in the near future.[3][4] "Corporate Elect", the fifth track on the album, is about the greed in the business world whose rules are defined by the top corporations.[3][7][5][4] The seventh track, "Primobile", is a self-referential piece about the band's members internal interactions. Both "Primobile" and "Corporate Elect" are in the industrial endeavor of reuniting a more direct punk and metal crossover.[8]

The lead single and sixth track of the album, "In Cythera" is an optimistic synthpop-influenced song reminiscent of "Adorations" and the band's sound in the mid-1980s.[8] Cythera, to which the lyrics of the song probably refer, is an island in Greece located at the south-western exit from the Aegean Sea, opposite to the south-eastern tip of the Peloponnese peninsula behind Cape Maleas.[9] This island was also the inspiration for many artists such as Italian early Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli for his painting The Birth of Venus, as well as for other similarly themed paintings that show the goddess Venus arriving at the shore of Cythera, for French Rococo painter Antoine Watteau's painting Embarkation for Cythera and French Modernist poet Charles Baudelaire's poem "A Voyage to Cythera", in which the poet called the island a "banal El Dorado". The penultimate track, "Trance", has a rumbling bass line mirroring that of early song "Psyche" and an abrasive guitar.[8] The closing track, "On All Hallow's Eve", is about Coleman's belief in ancestor worship supported by quantum theories that there is no death, bringing the album to a natural close.[3][4][6]

The album cover was designed by graphic artist and Killing Joke's long-time collaborator Mike Coles.[3] It depicts the profile of a skull and a machine both suspended in the air, and a devastated landscape in the background.