Album Review: The Prodigy - The Day Is My Enemy

It takes just 34 seconds into The Prodigy’s sixth album to confirm the self-parody and cartoonish slapstick that stunted their last two albums has been torched once and for all.

Tricky’s one-time squeeze Martina Topley-Bird provides the opening title track with its main soundbite, picking through burning rubble and marking Prodge territory like the hungry fox that adorns the cover. If ‘94’s Music For The Jilted Generation dragged punk kicking and spitting into the techno age, here Liam Howlett exhumes the corpse to take on the whole of an increasingly lazy EDM culture. Ibiza, for example, has Keith Flint taking on mega-wank DJs who pack a USB stick and more haircare products into their bags than records. Not long ago, he would simply have called Steve Aoki a cunt over a drum’n’bass turd and missed the point completely. Wild Frontier’s classic rave influences give the old nose the biggest whiff of Jilted-era molotov and Flint rasping, “I ain’t no tourist,” on Nasty with Narayan-style groaning and a sample from Alex Proyas’ 1998 film Dark City is paranoid and furious.

Considering for a while Pendulum not only stole, but also thoroughly rogered, their thunder, Howlett had no choice but to change or die, which he did by creating this album as a band with Flint and Maxim. Maxim’s contributions are more covertly planted than Flint’s, but the overall nocturnal aggression of The Day Is My Enemy makes for a long overdue repositioning of The Prodigy as firestarters.