Like him or loathe him, Bobby Gillespie has always been able to back up his notorious ego with a knack for innovative genre-hopping. It’s made Primal Scream a trailblazer when he’s ahead of the pack (1991’s Screamadelica), an unexpected chart topper when the world catches up to him (2006’s Riot City Blues), and a curiously redundant figure when he gloams onto styles that are growing mouldy at the back of the fridge (2016’s Chaosmosis, which tried to embrace a brand of indie pop already buckling under the weight of its many adherents).

Stringing these disparate experiments together has always been Gillespie’s blistering confidence and ‘bash the fash’ political sentiments. These elements of his music tend to sit on the sidelines, yet in Come Ahead Gillespie’s righteous sensibilities finally shine through with a coherent and heart-breaking vitality, swapping provocative sloganeering for fully formed sideswipes at Britain’s institutionalised cruelty. Produced by fellow 90s veteran David Holmes, the album magpies a chintzy approximation of disco and funk, swerving occasionally into American gospel and dour minor-chord rock.

At times the effect is almost irrepressible; from the heavy bass slaps of ‘Ready To Go Home’ to the peppy doo-wop of ‘Heal Yourself’, plenty on here could easily be mistaken for a Nile Rodgers curio until Gillespie’s slurring drawl kicks in. The party atmosphere in the first half (all orchestral swells, wah-wah pedals and abundant purloining of Sister Sledge’s exuberance) make it easy to miss the political comment flowing from song to the next. The mask slips when ‘Innocent Money’ finally lets its lyrics breathe, foregrounding Gillespie’s critique of capitalism while backing singers pointedly chant ‘always the wealthy, never the poor’, until a spoken-word interlude digs its claws into both trickle-down economics and political apathy from the working classes.

From there, the left-wing anger Gillespie has been harbouring lets loose. ‘False Flags’ follows a troubled teenager as he enlists in the army, only to be chewed up and spat out when the establishment no longer has any use for him. Meanwhile, ‘Deep Dark Waters’ details the mistreatment of refugees from a nation poisoned by anti-immigrant invective. It soon becomes clear that the ship sailing into those waters represents both asylum seekers searching for safety, and Britain itself, drowning in its own inhumanity. 

Come Ahead ends with ‘Settlers Blues’, a nine-minute arpeggio which surgically deconstructs colonialism’s destructive force throughout history, referencing land theft and genocide, and alluding unambiguously to the mass slaughter occurring in the Middle East. ‘The conquered become the conquerors, a murderous diaspora’ Gillespie laments, before a choir sing ‘oh, it’s happening again’ in a mournful repetition, no longer able to stomach the decadent disco this album opened with. It seems unlikely that art can alter any catastrophe happening on the world stage right now, but at the very least Come Ahead is trying to replicate the urgency of protest at a time when the public have every right to feel impotent. This is an era of despair, Gillespie seems to tell us, but at least we can despair together.

Come Ahead is released by BMG on Friday 8 November; Primal Scream will tour the UK next spring; main picture: Adam Peter Johnson.