Stop singing, start talking: Why has sprechgesang become so popular in contemporary music?

One highlight of the BBC’s excellent Mercury music prize awards show this week was a heart-stopping rendition by the absurdly gifted Jessie Buckley of Footnotes on the Map, from For All Our Days That Tear the Heart, her Mercury-nominated album with the guitarist Bernard Butler. It was a bravura piece of vocal styling that conjured up shades of Dusty Springfield, Loretta Lynn and Carole King. As well as being a fine actor, Buckley can certainly carry a tune.

But the night as a whole belonged more to speaking than to singing. This year’s winner, Little Simz, and her fellow nominee Kojey Radical both work within the long tradition of black music derived from American and Jamaican spoken word DJ culture, the dominant force in pop for what seems like forever.

The Mercurys span a range of genres, and three more of the 10 nominees relied as much on speech as on song. (One of the others, Fergus McCreadie, is a pianist.)

Of the performances on the night, Wet Leg’s Chaise Longue, from their eponymous debut album, is an amusing exercise in Gen-Z drollery. Yard Act’s 100% Endurance, from their album The Overload, is a surprisingly positive cod-metaphysical anthem, and Self Esteem’s I Do This All the Time, from her album Prioritise Pleasure, is a festival crowd-pleasing affirmation of female self-empowerment in the face of misogyny. All are good tunes, but their lyrics are largely spoken.

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This has been going on for a while. Elsewhere in today’s Irish Times, you can read about the latest album from Dry Cleaning, whose vocalist Florence Shaw is another spoken-word performer.

[ Florence Shaw: ‘Life’s a mess. Things that are black and white frighten me a bit’ ]

Much has been written about the increased popularity in Britain and Ireland of “spoken singing”, or sprechgesang. (The word derives from composers of the early 20th century, though one wonders what Schoenberg or Humperdinck would have made of Wet Leg’s invitation to “butter my muffin”). Ireland’s Fontaines DC, For Those I Love and Sinead O’Brien are prominent practitioners, too.

Some trace this current wave’s origins back almost a decade to the hard-hitting portraits of austerity Britain from Sleaford Mods and Kae Tempest during the David Cameron years. But you could equally point a couple of generations further back to post-punk innovators such as The Fall or Gang of Four, or indeed even further to Lou Reed’s generation. Given those precursors, it’s not surprising that the form has been more associated with sardonic misanthropes than with uplifting anthems or lighthearted singalongs. But that now seems to be shifting.

Fontaines DC may be the first internationally successful Dublin band with obvious Dublin accents since, well, The Dubliners

“There’s a thing I love happening in the UK right now,” the American super-producer and songwriter Jack Antonoff told Relix magazine in 2021, “which has these sort of Lou Reed-esque spoken-word verses with super melodic choruses that all these bands are doing … It’s coming hard and that’s not something you would have expected X amount of years ago.”

Others are less impressed. A review of The Overload in the online magazine the Quietus referred dismissively to “landfill sprechgesang”, recalling the worst years of mediocre indie rock in the noughties and pointing out that “bands that use sprechgesang now fill the BBC 6 Music airwaves and the larger stages of rock festival line-ups”.

Why has speech become so prevalent? Part of the answer, as always with pop music, is simple bandwagon-jumping. “We definitely Trojan Horsed it,” Yard Act told Louder Than Bombs. “To get a bit of attention [off] the back of some of those groups but knowing we were gonna subvert it and move away from it as soon as we can. Which sounds quite cynical.”

The honesty is admirable. But the form itself does seem well attuned (so to speak) to our times. Among its apparent virtues: a stripped-back authenticity and immediacy, a rejection of artifice, a foregrounding of raw personal experience, greater opportunities for wit and verbal dexterity. And it’s welcome that most practitioners make a virtue of their actual accents: Fontaines DC may be the first internationally successful Dublin band with obvious Dublin accents since, well, The Dubliners.

There’s an unavoidable sameness to some of this stuff, particularly if it cleaves too closely to the hoary old British post-punk/American hardcore template

All that said, there’s an unavoidable sameness to some of this stuff, particularly if it cleaves too closely to the hoary old British post-punk/American hardcore template. Listening to too much of it can feel like you’re trapped on the upper deck of a late-night bus with a man who won’t let you leave until you’ve heard his tragic life story in its entirety. But the Wet Legs and the Self Esteems bring something different and more contemporary: a spin on generational experiences and gender politics in the 2020s that feels fresher, more of the moment and, crucially, closer to the pop mainstream.

It’s surely only a matter of time until Jessie Buckley makes her sprechgesang debut. Although it’ll still seem like a waste of a wonderful voice.