Five Back-to-Work Bangers to Get You Through the Worst Day of the Year

This post ran originally on THUMP UK.

Remember Christmas? It was good wasn’t it. You—probably, hopefully—spent the last week or so doing absolutely fuck all. You barely got dressed. Mustering up the strength to slide another wedge of knock-off Pringles down your chocolate-lubed gullet was an achievement. There was sherry and Scrabble and late at night, when everyone had gone to bed and you were left alone with a crate of Stella and an episode of Dad’s Army, an almost overwhelming sense of sadness. Christmas…love it!

That’s all over now, that’s dead and buried, that’s gone for another fucking year. No more After Eights, no more games of Frustration, no more worrying about your grandad’s cholesterol levels. The tinsel’s been shoved back in the cupboard under the stairs and all that’s left is the bitter tang of regret and chocolate liqueurs. It’s time to get back to work!

And that’s—probably, hopefully—where you find yourself now. Sat in an office on an industrial estate, wondering where it all went wrong, praying for the sweet release of 5.30, already daydreaming about the washing you’re going to catch up on when you get home. Today is—probably, hopefully—the worst day of the year, so we thought we’d do you a favor and put together this playlist of records that’ll take you far, far away from the HR department. Just remember, you’ve only got another 45 years of this. Just 45 more years. That’s not so long.

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1. Marcus Henriksson – A Matter of the Heart

You can play a day like today in one of two ways. The first game involves subsuming yourself in grief and wallowing in wanton self-pity like a bedroom-bound teenage boy mooning over a girl from school he’s never actually spoken to but is definitely madly in love with. No one wins in that game because you’ll find yourself staring at a blank spreadsheet listening to Leonard Cohen and the next thing you know you’ll be sat in a service station Burger King eating a Long Texas BBQ that’s sodden with tears. The second, and infinitely more rewarding option, is to put on songs like Marcus Henriksson’s otherworldly, ethereal, disturbingly seductive minimal slinker. You’ll be taken to a more gentle place, a place where work ceases to exist and we can all live out our fully automated luxury communist dreams. Well, either that or you’ll want to jump headfirst out of the office and into the open arms of the nearest dealer before hot-footing it to Vauxhall and never, ever, ever going back to your job. Josh Baines

2. Miro – Spaceman (Trance Mix)

Don’t listen to the naysayers—even the ones living inside your head—this is your year. You, right now, are a Kenco slugging miracle in waiting. You are the eventual realization of millennia of human thinking. You, illuminated by the incandescent bulbs of your shared work-space, are an intricate blessing, God’s greatest design, the final product. You are to Telesales what Cicero was to the spoken word. You, my friend, are a spaceman. Angus Harrison

3. The Blackout Crew – Dialled

A while back now, before Brexit and Trump and all those absolutely fucking hilarious memes that we knew and loved last year, before the world turned into mulch and disappointment, we proclaimed the video for “Dialled” by donk heroes the Blackout Crew to be “the most painfully accurate work related video ever,” and that’s an opinion we’re still very much backing. Slap this utterly terrifying piece of work on and thank the lord above that you don’t work at Blackout Services. If you do work there, you have our gravest and most sincere apologies. JB.

4. Arian – Your Love

Today was never going to be easy. Whether you’re one of the poor retail-working sods who only got four hours off on Christmas day, or the sort of overpaid PR consultant whose holiday began in the middle of November, today was never going to be easy. Despite all the resting you’ve been doing—all the sitting around doing nothing but raising lumps of cheese from a plate up and into your yellowing mouth—you still feel tired somehow. It’s as though the very concept of a working day has sent a dull ache through your joints, as though the air-conditioning in your office is leaking carbon monoxide. And on top of all of that heartache, everyone around you won’t stop complaining about the fact they have to start work again today. The solution? Probably best to listen to some spangled Yugoslavian funk and get over yourself. AH

5. Manuel Gottsching – E2-E4

Time’s a fucker isn’t it. Time never works the way you want it to. Time never bends to your will. Today of all days, time is an enemy that must be destroyed. The seconds have become minutes, the minutes hours, the hours whole series’ of Suits. You ate lunch—a quinoa sandwich—at 11. You’ve gone to the toilet six times and you’re starting to notice the looks you’re getting. You’ve even gamely tried to fix the printer. Nothing’s working. Time’s not going anywhere and you feel your skin greying, your bones getting heavier, your soul being slowly crushed under the weight of an upcoming 360-degree feedback session. There’s a solution and that solution is to listen to everyone’s favorite extended Balearic fretwank on repeat. E2-E4 is nearly an hour long, and hey, there’s only a certain amount of hours you’ve got to be at work for, right? Eyes shut, deep breaths, and the eternally enjoyable sound of a bunch of sunburnt German hippies shagging in sand dunes: this is as close to heaven as you’ll get on Old Street. JB.

Both Josh and Angus are on Twitter—aren’t you lucky!