The awfulness of the Red Hot Chili Peppers has always felt weirdly personal

Squaring up to the prospect of a new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m reminded of a vintage quote by Nick Cave: ‘I’m forever near a stereo saying, “What… is this garbage?” And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.’ I can empathise. I don’t habitually harbour animus against artists I dislike, but something about the sheer scale of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ awfulness has always felt weirdly personal.

Despite the kind of success that looks mightily impressive in a Wikipedia stat dump – 100 million record sales, multiple Grammy wins, numerous number ones – the Californian rock band have always been tricky to tolerate, let alone love. The reasons for this are manifold. Their grimly juvenile take on sexual relations envelops their music in a cloud of toxic testosterone. One song is called ‘Hump de Bump’, another ‘Party on Your Pussy’. They have an album titled The Uplift Mofo Party Plan. They became notorious for wearing sports socks over their genitals and depicting Californian frat-boy shenanigans with all the reverence of Homer contemplating the Elysian Plains. When they on occasion turn their attention to matters of ‘spirituality’, the lyrical wisdom has the depth and nuance of an Insta meme.

The music? The music is an ugly Frankenstein’s monster constructed from all the least likeable, least groovy bits of rock, funk, psychedelia and hip hop, with an added patina of plain stupidity. Singer Anthony Kiedis radiates the kind of braggadocious bro vibes that, aurally speaking, make me want to cross the road for my own safety. Kiedis writes terrible lyrics, flatlining melodies and has a horrible shouty voice. It goes without saying that he possesses the kind of swaggering confidence inversely proportional to all these impediments.