DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
Anybody familiar with the teeth-gnashing, blood-dripping punk snarl of Kid Kapichi knows about their ‘Fearless Nature’, so it should, at first glance, come as no surprise that the Hastings band’s fourth album should take that title.
The group that lacerated the anxious political zeitgeist with the partygate-bait of ‘Party At No. 10’ or challenged Kafkaesque Brexit disillusionment with ‘Can EU Hear Me’ have from day one stood out in their fearlessness when it comes to sticking their heads above the parapet.
Lean in closer to ‘Fearless Nature’, though, and something is different. On lead single ‘Stainless Steel’, when that album title first crosses the lips of frontman Jack Wilson, it is not in the form of a statement of defiance but in a moment of doubt.
“Are you scared of your fearless nature?” he sings, and it is clear the question is pointed at himself. “I’m not made of stainless steel,” goes the chorus. “I’m made of blood, I’m made of bone”.
Wilson describes ‘Stainless Steel’ as the bridge from the old Kid Kapichi to the new, and in its lethal, taut, muscular efficiency it certainly bears the hallmarks of the band’s classic sound, but the maturity of its point of view and the courage in its vulnerability is something new.
The songs that make up the album were written during the summer of 2024, a period of deep change in Wilson life. “I was in a pretty awful place where I just didn’t know who I was, what I was doing,” he explains. “I felt extremely depressed, which I’d never experienced before in my life.”
The end of a stable relationship had become the catalyst for a swirl of mental health challenges for Wilson, and one consequence was that where his writing had once been fuelled by anger, it was now being controlled by fear.
“The other albums were observations, written about other people,” he says. “This one resounds with me and who I was at the time. It is introspective, I had just had my mind blown open to how vulnerable I was.”
You hear it throughout ‘Fearless Nature’, an album riven with moments of self-doubt made by a band that has grown bold enough to show the bullet holes in their armour after years on the frontline.
“Too hot, too cold, reputation to uphold, too weak, too bold, there’s a reputation to live up to,” Wilson sings at the outset of ‘Intervention’, amid a squall of guitar feedback that masquerades as the grey fuzz of a mind overheating with confusion and insecurity.
The making of the record proved to be therapeutic for Wilson and the risks he took in opening up have paid off. “I feel great now. When I listen to this album, it’s the most proud I’ve ever been of anything I’ve ever done, because listening back to it, it’s like, I was in a place I’d never been before and wasn’t really equipped to deal with. Now, I’ve got control of the situation.”
‘Fearless Nature’ is also a bridge to a new Kid Kapichi in a more literal sense. In May 2025, guitarist Ben Beetham and drummer George Macdonald announced they were leaving the band, a decision they had made internally some six months earlier. The choice was made amicably, and ‘Fearless Nature’ stands at the intersection of the two generations; the songs were written, recorded and produced with the old line-up (co-produced by Beetham alongside Mike Horner), but are now set to be taken on the road with the new makeup of the band.
Guitarist Lee Martin and drummer Miles Gill are both longtime friends of Wilson and bassist Eddie Lewis and veterans of countless hard-playing bands on the live circuit in the South of England. “They are insanely talented,” Wilson says. “There’s a whole new vibrancy, especially at live shows where we’re all bouncing off the walls because it feels like our first ever gig again.”
Make no mistake, the band that self-produced their incendiary debut album ‘This Time Next Year’ during the pandemic is alive and well in the fabric of ‘Fearless Nature’ too, though. You don’t need a political diploma to identify Wilson’s targets on ‘Leader Of The Free World’, for example, when he sings, “Is it the money or the people / Is it the church or the steeple / It turns out the first one was better than the sequel”.
On the haunting, liminal ‘Dark Days Are Coming’, we hear the two themes coalesce, with Wilson singing of being trapped inside his mind with a “voice that’s been designed to keep me up at night”, before turning the spotlight outwards at the legacy of austerity-era Britain: “And I find that it’s dangerous to trust in the hand that cradles us, in the eyes that label us the grit that won’t come loose.”
Kid Kapichi belong to a generation of punk-coded artists that have spearheaded a renewed political activism in grassroots music culture in Britain in recent years, a movement that has come under fire in 2025 due to what Wilson describes as the “absolute madness” of the dismissed terror trial of Kneecap’s Mo Chara in London and the tabloid paranoia stoked after Bob Vylan’s provocative Glastonbury set.
“The fact that they’re trying so hard to shut down independent artists is a sign of the times and it is showing that it is working,” Wilson says. “They’re doing this because they know that people are listening and they are waking up. What we’re doing and what other bands are doing is working.”
The band’s political message may be undimmed, but with ‘Fearless Nature’ expanding their repertoire, it now has company. Their decision to allow an emotional complexity into their lyrical perspective is a major step forward, and the benefits are there for all to draw strength from.
“When I listen to this album, I’m like, this makes so much fucking sense,” says Wilson. “It’s comforting to know how much things can change in a short space of time. The message of the album is that it does get better and you do get through it.”
präsentiert von: Frontstage Magazine, FUZE, Visions
