A DIY Protest Song With Bite, Wit, And Zero Interest In Staying Neutral
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Mark Garvey takes aim at the uneasy relationship between music and political responsibility on In a World Full of Sheerans, Be More Macklemore
, a single that challenges the notion that artists can remain detached from the world around them. Unapologetically direct, the song confronts the tension between creative expression, public influence and silence, questioning what it means for musicians to have a platform but choose not to use it.
For Garvey, the message is blunt: art is political, music is political, and neutrality is its own kind of statement. He doesn’t dress that up in polite abstraction. He leans into it, hard. The song channels Garvey’s frustration with the debate around Ed Sheeran and Macklemore into a scrappy, confrontational piece of protest music. It’s the kind of song that wants to start an argument in the pub and keep it going on the walk home.
What makes it hit harder is the way Garvey made it. He’s kept the whole thing fiercely DIY, assembling the song in Adobe Premiere Pro, the sort of move that sounds impossible until you consider how Garvey treats process like a dare. There’s a rough-edged ingenuity to that approach, a sense of someone refusing the neat lanes the industry prefers. The result feels deliberately off-centre, a little unruly, and all the more alive for it.
Garvey’s work lives in the overlap between music, film, and art project, and this release pushes that instinct further. The accompanying video amplifies the joke and the jab at once, with a performer billed in the pitch as “Hertfordshire’s greatest dancer” in a shell-suit and a ridiculous Ed Sheeran mask turning the whole thing into low-budget political pantomime. It’s funny, sure, but the laughter comes with teeth. Garvey understands that satire lands best when it’s allowed to look a bit daft.
Sonically, In a World Full of Sheerans, Be More Macklemore
sits in that scruffy corner of alternative rock where grunge hangovers meet bedroom experimentation. There’s a one-man-band energy running through it, the kind that leaves fingerprints all over the glass. Garvey’s voice cuts through the noise with the urgency of someone who’s less interested in being liked than being heard.
That’s the core of his appeal: he makes work that feels handmade because it is handmade, and he treats this release like a small act of defiance. In Garvey’s world, songs are arguments, sketches, videos, and mischief all at once. This one is all four. And it says exactly what he wants it to say.
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