The Beatroot Road throw an anti-war party for the dead on their twisted new single 'Zombie Jamboree'

The Beatroot Road have found a suitably macabre way to make an anti-war song; by turning the graveyard into a dancefloor and letting the dead host the party.

Built around the chorus of Conrad Eugene Mauge's calypso song 'Zombie Jamboree', the track combines Halloween mischief with a much darker argument about humanity's repeated appetite for religious and territorial conflict. Its narrator is a cemetery spirit loosely inspired by a darker manifestation of Baron Samedi, welcoming successive generations of war dead into an increasingly crowded celebration.

But rather than constructing a solemn protest ballad, The Beatroot Road make the music both physical and inviting. Fiddle, Cajun and zydeco accordion, triangle and the project’s ever-present bodhrán create a swampy, roots-heavy pulse, while Jamaican vocalist Sledge and UK soul singer Cath Coombes bring contrasting personalities to the vocal arrangement. And the result fits neatly with The Beatroot Road’s broader resistance to genre boundaries.

Their music is built around deliberately mismatched traditions, with musicians recording across numerous countries before they're assembled and processed at Laboratory X Studio near Vancouver. Here, folk instrumentation, calypso lineage, soul and dance rhythms coexist without much interest in being neatly categorised.

Its argument is that wars repeatedly emerge from old grievances presented as newly urgent, while ordinary people continue paying the price. The satirical graveyard celebration turns that repetition into something absurd, as generation after generation arrive at the same party because humanity has failed to learn very much from the previous conflict.

Funny without being flippant and politically frustrated without becoming musically dour, 'Zombie Jamboree' turns human folly into a grotesque party that apparently never needs to end. And for a Halloween record, that may be the most unsettling joke of all.