Matthew Herbert Made an Album Out of Groceries. The Subject Is Food Poverty.

Matthew Herbert has always treated sound sources as a moral question as much as a technical one. His previous project, The Horse, was built from instruments made out of a horse skeleton. His new album is built from groceries.

The record is titled ukhasmorefoodbanksthanbranchesofmcdonalds.com, and the title doubles as the URL where it is distributed. Pasta, cereal, tinned fruit, nappies and toilet roll all serve as sonic material. Herbert describes the album as a comment on social inequality, driven by a long-standing interest in food and the systems that underpin it.

The numbers behind the title are the argument. The Food Foundation estimated in July that food insecurity affects close to one in eight UK households, up from 11.3% to 12.2%, and one in six households with children, amounting to roughly 6.5 million adults and 2.2 million children. Herbert also cites around 4.5 million emergency food parcels delivered last year and 400,000 children supported by baby banks, an 11% increase.

“In 2000 there were no food banks in the UK. There are now over 2,800,” he says, connecting that growth to austerity policies and noting that the number of UK billionaires rose from around 30 to around 150 across the same period.

Rather than sell the album, Herbert is distributing it as a free download: listeners are asked to donate to an organisation in their area working on food poverty and to write to their MP. Those outside the UK are pointed toward comparable local charities. The album arrives on 16 October. The first single, pasta (is not a luxury), is out now.