History repeats itself indefinitely. Or at least it seems that way to me. We Do Not Forget's opening track of the same name confused me when I first listened to it. This is an album that was recorded between 2020 and 2024, and has lyrics that address Mr President directly, calling on him to "stop this war". The current US President is a man baby that takes up so much oxygen that it's easy to assume that anything modern addressing the president directly would be addressing him, but the album was produced in the era between his two terms in office.
It's only upon reading the notes that I realise that the song is sampling a speech given in 1991, directed at George Bush, father of George W. Bush, both men responsible for wars in the Middle East. Whose terms between which Bill Clinton had been involved with wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and had launched military strikes against Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan. Who would be succeeded by Barrack Obama who would continue conflicts in the Middle East and famously conducted 542 drone strikes. The wars don't end. Exactly which president the track is directed towards is basically irrelevant.
It's a theme that's continued in Forever War, whose lyrics are also the result of clever and effective sampling. This track is great, by the way. An eerie and depressed guitar part mixed with the hip hop beats make it sound like something from Me & THIS Army, that Radiohead hip hop mashup album that released shortly after Hail to the Thief. Probably a bit of a deep cut but I listened to that a lot, but you can use early 2000s Radiohead as your reference point and it still applies.
So those first two tracks are a little depressing in an "isn't the world bad beyond repair?" kinda way, but that starts to shift with The Be Hated and Thus Corrected brings in a glimmer of hope, despite the title. It's beautiful, actually. The central thesis is that "anger can be creative", and it seems to me it's saying that to feel the horrors of the world is to be engaged, and that only by being engaged is one able to make a change. The music, the beat, it's wonderful, and a real high point of the album.
Another high point is the Indian-inflected pop of Sustain. It's fun, it's jazzy, it sounds like something The Avalanches could have put out. But like everything that came before it, there's still a thesis here. It's written in plain text too - Communities Sustain Life.
The world is riddled with problems. Wars persist and shift indefinitely. The people in power are corrupt. It all seems insurmountable, and often exhausting. But We Do Not Forget delivers a pretty necessary message for how to deal with it. Don't get complacent. The world is neither a problem for one person to fix nor one to be ignored. We all live here and we all do what we can to make things right.