London’s Uncanny Valley Girls, fronted by Michael Bissett and backed by a rotating cast of collaborators, have built a reputation on London’s grassroots scene since 2018 through sharp songwriting and genuinely electric live shows. “2 Vexed 2 Tired,” out September 3rd, takes its cheeky title from the second Fast and Furious film while pulling its actual substance from cultural critic Mark Fisher’s idea of the slow cancellation of the future. Bissett says the song arrived to him in a dream, an old Rastafarian man in a laundrette telling him he was too vexed and too tired, a line Bissett hummed into his phone before falling back asleep. Written during a bleak January weighed down by work, routine, and general uncertainty, the song ultimately wrestles with a simple question: keep fighting, or give up.
Thematically, this song speaks to the moment in a way that only a young artist really can. There’s a specific kind of burnout running through it that feels generational: the exhaustion of living inside an endless stream of information because the internet has effectively become where people actually live, partly because home ownership has slipped out of reach for so many. The lyrics track that sense of stalled possibility directly, describing a flattened, repetitive present where nothing feels new and the future promised earlier in life has quietly slipped away, leaving exhaustion in its place rather than anything to look forward to.
Musically, the buoyant synths and dancehall-inflected drums work as a deliberate mask for all of that anxiety, the bounce in the production pulling against the weight in the words rather than matching it. Bissett has described the track plainly as “a call for help from a very dark place,” and while that honesty gives the song real stakes, its existence still reads as an act of defiance against the burnout it’s describing, proof that the exhaustion hasn’t won yet.
