Pixies frontman Black Francis has admitted that a collection of recent world events has led to “rippling tension everywhere”.

Speaking to NME in a new interview, the singer – AKA Frank Black – said he worried about the world being left behind for his children and their generation.

“Some of the events of the last few years, with the Presidential election in the United States and Donald Trump and all that other nonsense, and then the coronavirus pandemic and now worldwide recession, amid these extreme weather patterns, add together all this stuff and it starts to feel very dystopian,” he said.

“There’s an economic strain on people and you see it when you go to Aldi and realise, ‘Shit, there are four security guards in this fucking discount grocery store to make I don’t run off with too many cans of tuna fish for free!’”

Francis cited a number of factors – including “the United States banning abortion but not guns, despite the mass shootings” and “the hottest day of the year” – for creating the feeling that “we’re going to hell in a handbasket, and it’s the most grim and dystopian it’s ever been in my lifetime.”

“I’m embarrassed in front of my children, just sheepishly apologising: ‘Sorry the world’s as corrupt as it is!’” he continued, while adding that “even if you have a fatalist view of life, sometimes you just have to sit back and find a way to enjoy that damn coffee”.

Pixies will share their new album along with the single ‘There’s A Moon On’ on September 30 via BMG. You can pre-order the album here and hear the first single above.

The new album marks the follow-up to 2019’s ‘Beneath The Eyrie‘, which NME praised in a four-star review as an “otherworldly album” that “filters present-day tribulations through the band’s witchy, psychedelic prism”.