The new Crime & the City Solution album began life as a PhD application that came to life when the band’s core members’ nomadic lifestyle was put on pause by the pandemic. Simon Bonney and Bronwyn Adams found themselves stuck in their native Australia under one of the world’s strictest lockdowns. “Naturally,” says Simon, “I sat and pieced together a PhD application about decision-making in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. But as it turned out, it was actually more of a record than it was a PhD.” The PhD and, by turn, the album found inspiration from Bonney’s work delivering aid programs across the Indo-Pacific region. Through that work, he visited places with high levels of violence and the album, in part, acted as a way in which to process the effect that turmoil has had on his psyche, ...