On the follow-up to his 2022 EP Cry Havoc!, Mobley constructs a story about the wreckage of an empire. His full-length debut on Last Gang Records, We Do Not Fear Ruins, emerges not merely as a full-throated concept album but as temporal insurgency – a bold deconstruction of what the music critic Mark Fisher might have called our “lost futures.”
At its center breathes Jacob Creedmoor, an early-Eighties NYC dissident placed in suspended animation for three centuries. No mere sci-fi conceit, through Creedmoor’s exile, the music burrows deep into the machinations of time-based violence.
The selection of 1981 New York proves masterful – a fracture point where futures began closing, where the demolition crews of Ronald Reagan, or some version of him, laid waste to possibility. By freezing his protagonist at this precise historical juncture, Mobley creates the ideal vessel for exploring hauntological recall, not as a nostalgic retreat but as a practitioner of revolutionary praxis.
The record mirrors the disorientation of displacement, swelling throughout in fits and starts. “No Exit” begins with Morricone-inspired whistling as Mobley’s wandering Creedmoor wonders, “What am I without people?” The tension between laid-back verses and earnest choruses mirrors the character’s internal conflict – a perpetual loner proclaiming undying love for an imperfect humanity he remembers, but is lost to the past.
The most interesting song on the album is “Let Go,” a 50-second composition placed early in the track listing – an unusual spot for an interlude. In closing the abbreviated track, Mobley croons, “The longer that you stay/ It’s hard sometimes to let go.” Is it Creedmoor or Mobley speaking?
“Phantom Hand,” with its Seventies funk undertones, extends the haunting motifs established in “Y’r Ghost,” the album”s big single, where Mobley moves “like a man possessed” by a “broken shadow.” More than metaphor, these spectral visitations become an ontological condition – the experience of being simultaneously here and elsewhere, now and then. On “Worriboutta ’81,” Mobley name-checks “COINTEL and Wounded Knee,” not to wallow in historical trauma, but to reconfigure memory as resistance. This isn’t just recalling the past; it’s breaking open closed circuits of possibility.
“Now Forever” demolishes linear time altogether, noting the fallibility of our memories and what we’ll do to maintain any semblance of them. “The past was just invented,” Mobley declares over mod-inflected rhythms that collapse into Weezer-esque walls of sound. This deliberate juxtaposition – past against present, invention against memory – epitomizes the album’s formal genius.
Perhaps most devastating is “A Story You’d Tell at a Party,” where Creedmoor confronts his ultimate fear: that his existence has been reduced to anecdote, a cautionary tale shared by those who remained anchored in time. The distance between listener and narrator collapses entirely when Mobley asks, “Would you know who I am?/ Peering down from your parapet walls/ At the shambling remains of a man.”
In an era drowning in recycled sounds, Mobley has constructed something genuinely revolutionary: an album transcending classification precisely because it exists outside conventional timelines.
We Do Not Fear Ruins exists in its refusal to accept exile as final sentence. Where academic discussions of Afrofuturism remain theoretical, Mobley makes us feel both the vertigo of displacement and the revolutionary potential of breaking free. This isn’t escapist fantasy, but urgent manifesto – a declaration that those excluded from history’s forward march can still imagine and create liberative futures.
Mobley plays an album release show at Parish on June 21.
Mobley
We Do Not Fear Ruins (Last Gang Records)
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This article appears in June 6 • 2025.
