The semi-real borough of Borderville – half City of Lost Children, one quarter Airstrip One, two twentieths Brazil, three twentieths Parnassus – has given birth to a conceptual nightmare, a giant mirror that will reflect for you, should you wish it, a chromatic and blinding vision of ‘the daily grind’ we call life. But they’re neither Jean-Pierre Jeunet hyperactive dwarfs nor cannibalistic butchers to carve up the bloody truth here, but a grim and beautiful picture of Dystopian Today, the City we inhabit, the shit that turns the wheels; ‘the cry behind the eye of every person that you meet, in the lung and on the tongue and in the movement of the feet; it’s the barely hidden hunger for the meat, meat, meat!’. Yes, Borderville has succeeded in giving birth to the world’s first glam rock sat-opera devoted to the cogs in the machine: the royal We, as in You. Ian Anderson would be proud. Has anybody sent him a copy?

Hewn lovingly from 24-carat Glam-ore – mined from Borderville’s many spiritual quarries no doubt – the band finally releases this debut opus of musical theatre. It consists of an ebullient guided tour of their City, replete with one hundred stark personalities. And through this tour, we see that in fact Borderville is a microcosm of our own machination. As a debut album it is epic; in fact it is so massive, it beggars belief that everything is done and dusted within 45 minutes. But we don’t realise the parallel with our own City at the outset, so we gaily embark with earpieces on loud and guidebooks open, eager to learn from each and every garish and gothic exhibit (spread unevenly across 13 tracks) on display. And what better tool to show us around a capitalist dystopia than via glam prog rock? Exactly.

And wow. We never guessed how scathing yet spastic a tale this was going to be. Five minutes in and we’ve seen visceral panic, ten and we’ve witnessed spasmodic-convulsive theatrics; fifteen, nervous pop; soporific nursery rhyme. Early track ‘Joy’ manages in four lines to both crush any hope you may have of finding peace within the shadows of capitalism, whilst sending you into a happy slumber (a bit like soma, then). The middle quartet of tracks is itself pure vaudeville, with title track ‘Joy Through Work’ sounding as ironic and hysterically English as Thick As A Brick ever was but condensed into just five manic minutes. What a city. This could be the soundtrack to Terry Gilliam’s latest epic. But the penny’s dropped by now; the paranoia’s probably not just allegorical. Cigarette breaks really are just illusions of freedom!

Singer Joe Swarbrick and his bunch of merry misfits have perhaps been leading up to this record for a good many years. At one point Swarbrick was front man of Sexy Breakfast, last seen creating swathes of demented candour, scenes of widescreen madness, to the theme from of The Snowman. Here, we’re reminded of The Wall in terms of ambition, but narrated by Happiness Stan. And like Chris T-T did with his London trilogy, the story hits home when we glimpse, fleetingly, some of the multiple personalities struggling to make some sense of Borderville. For example – and strikingly – out of all the consumerist reference and bile, track ‘Blood on the Kitchen Floor’ evokes the darkest images in the album, describing an event of two summers ago, a note left on the kitchen table explaining ‘why she’s sick of this town’. At an earlier stop, Swarbrick achieves both derision and pity towards ‘the scene, the scene/the bright young things/the angular haircuts/the skinny tight jeans’. Ironically, the track is the only to sound anything like the scene we’re looking at. But this street is short; our guide doesn’t dwell for long and leading us around a corner we find ourselves face to face with the ‘Beast of England’, a schizophrenic neighbourhood full of crack-wizened smiles and rusty spoons. Like staring helplessly at a suburban Brownfield site in which a deranged Luke Haines, in some lunatic acid hysteria, is gyrating frantically around a disused TV set, there are twisted tales on offer here.

The line about ‘hidden hunger for the meat, meat, meat!’ from ‘Joy Through Work’ is recapped with modified lyrics – almost a leitmotif – in ‘Work’; as we turn corner after corner, we catch glimpses of distant blocks that we visited earlier on: ‘There’s a sickness in the heart of every person I have met/that eats away ambition/and replaces it with debt/and monotony and hunger and a dull regret’. Only mildly garnished with glumness, this is a candid record to face what could become, in the wrong hands, too serious a topic. After our tour however, we climb a hill and look down at Borderville. It twinkles in the twilight. And up here, free from demonic personalities, we meet our guide’s real family. ‘They’re all that you’ve got for your own’, reminds Swarbrick. The contraption might be terrible, says Borderville, but sod the machine; the cogs are human. Wait, change the address on that envelope – Terry Gilliam should get a copy of this.

Joy Through Work is self-released, available in gatefold hard copy and on all major digital platforms from 7th December

Adam Fletcher