Matthew Herbert is no stranger to a concept album. Last time we spoke to the British electronic musician, he had just finished off The Horse, a project recorded with custom instruments fashioned from a horse skeleton, including bone flutes, a pelvis banjo and a shaker filled with dried horse semen.
Herbert’s talent for conjuring musical sounds from unusual sources is being harnessed once again on his latest project, a sample-based album written with the aim of raising awareness around food poverty in the UK.
The record, titled ukhasmorefoodbanksthanbranchesofmcdonalds.com (the name is also the URL of the website used to distribute it) is made entirely from samples of everyday food items and household essentials. Pasta, cereal, nappies, toilet roll and tinned fruit were all used as sonic source material in the making of the project, which Herbert describes as a “comment on social inequality”.
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Inspired by Herbert’s “long-standing interest in food and the systems that underpin it”, the album is intended to draw attention to the growing food insecurity among the British population and raise funds to support organisations working to address it.
Figures shared by UK charity The Food Foundation in July show that food insecurity now affects almost 1 in 8 British households, with numbers increasing from 11.3% in 2025 to 12.2% in 2026. The picture is even starker when it comes to families: the charity estimates that 1 in 6 households with children are now experiencing food insecurity. Overall, this equates to 6.5m adults and 2.2m children across the UK.
Noting in the album title that the UK now has more food banks than branches of McDonalds, Herbert also points out that an estimated 4.5m emergency food parcels were delivered in the UK last year, and 400,000 children were supported by baby banks, an increase of 11% on 2025’s numbers.
“In 2000 there were no food banks in the UK. There are now over 2,800,” reads a statement from Herbert. “Over the same period the number of billionaires in the UK went from around 30 to around 150 – a direct consequence of austerity policies pursued by successive governments over the last fifteen years.”
To address this, Herbert has made the album available as a free download, with the stipulation that listeners make a donation to an organisation in their area supporting those at risk of food poverty, and write to their local MP. Those that don’t live in the UK are encouraged to support a comparable local charity or organisation.
This isn’t the first time Herbert has drawn inspiration from the culinary world in his music-making. His 2005 album Plat Du Jour was created using the sounds of food preparation and production, and back in 2016, he turned cheese, aubergine and ham into edible, playable vinyl records for The Science Gallery’s FED UP: The Future of Food exhibition.
ukhasmorefoodbanksthanbranchesofmcdonalds.com is due for release on October 16th.
The first single from the album, pasta (is not a luxury), is out now.
