The sound of wind immediately brings up images of a desolate landscape. A lightly distorted, finger-plucked guitar begins picking out a chord sequence, each note ringing with an ominous tension, almost as if it’s counting down to something. The drums slowly build underneath it, rumbling softly and getting louder and more insistent.

And then all hell breaks loose.

“April 2031” arrives on “Dog Eat Dog” with the same heaviness that kicked the door in on “Machine Gun” and “The Hole In My Wall.” The main riffs are fucking enormous. It’s almost military like in its foot-stomping, groove-heavy, rock that makes you move before you’ve even worked out what Jani Lane is singing about.

And then you realise what he’s singing about.

The world is fucked. Literally.

The sky is gone. The oceans are gone. The trees are gone. Oxygen is something that has to be manufactured.

The Moon carries the evidence of what we’ve done. People live inside artificial environments and sleep on aluminium pillows.

And the strangest thing is how casual it all sounds.

“They say the sky used to be blue / I don’t quite believe it”

What a fucking opening.

Imagine growing up in a world where nobody has seen a blue sky.

Someone tells you that the sky was once blue and you think they’re telling you a fairy tale.

Of course you don’t believe them.

Your reality is your reference point.

The kids in this song don’t remember the world we know.

They’ve inherited whatever is left.

The blue sky becomes folklore.

Birds become something from a storybook.

Wind becomes something that used to happen before fans were needed to create it. And that idea has become more unsettling with time.

When Lane wrote this, 2031 sounded like another civilisation.

Now it’s five years away.

That’s not a prediction. It’s just an increasingly uncomfortable date on the calendar.

“And hug my aluminium pillow / Oh so tight”

This might be my favourite image in the song because it’s so fucking weird.

An aluminium pillow. It sounds ridiculous. And that’s exactly why it sticks.

We tend to imagine the apocalypse as fire, explosions and people running through cities.

Lane imagines something quieter.

People have adapted. They’ve sealed themselves indoors. They wear safety goggles. They use artificial atmosphere machines. They’ve worked out how to survive in the wreckage.

And eventually someone has to sleep. So they make an aluminium pillow.

Because humans are remarkably good at normalising things. Give us enough time and almost anything becomes routine.

The world hasn’t necessarily ended.

People are still getting up. They’re still eating. They’re still sleeping. They’re still going to work. They’re just doing it inside a machine because we fucked up the outside.

“And the nuclear ring / Around the Moon was caused by man”

The Moon. Something so old that humanity barely registers as a footnote in its history.

We spend our lives worrying about our little patch of suburbia, our mortgage, our football team, our inbox, the price of petrol.

Meanwhile, our species has figured out how to put a fucking ring around the Moon.

And nobody knows what to do about it.

The Moon is damaged.

Put your safety goggles on.

The oceans are gone.

Go to sleep.

The atmosphere is artificial.

Try not to get sick.

That’s how you know the catastrophe has already happened.

Nobody is surprised anymore.

“Some were angry most just looked the other way”

This is where Jani Lane stops writing science fiction and starts writing history.

Vietnam.

The lies.

The ammunition sold.

The people who protested.

The people who knew.

The people who were angry.

And the much larger number who simply carried on.

That’s uncomfortable because we love the idea that history is changed by heroes and villains.

It’s cleaner that way.

But most of the time it’s ordinary people making ordinary decisions while something enormous happens around them.

Somebody objects.

Somebody profits.

Somebody votes.

Somebody gets tired of hearing about it.

Somebody decides it isn’t their problem.

Somebody looks the other way.

Then twenty years later everyone asks how the fuck did this happen.

“No more music no more songs”

That’s a great little piece of songwriting.

We’ve spent the entire song watching the world disappear.

No sky.

No trees.

No oceans.

No oxygen.

Then suddenly:

No music.

No songs.

Music is what humans do when we’re trying to make sense of being alive.

We write songs. We tell stories. We fall in love. We argue. We make terrible decisions. We make art about all of it.

Take all that away and you’ve got more than a dead planet. You’ve got an empty one.

And the irony is sitting right there in the speakers.

We’re listening to a fucking rock band sing about a future in which there are no rock bands.

And the riffs. They make the song.

The guitars aren’t mourning. They’re stomping. The groove is huge. The band sounds alive.

Lane is describing a world beyond resuscitation. There’s a weird tension between the music and the story.

And perhaps that’s exactly right.

A song about the end of the world shouldn’t necessarily sound like the end of the world.

Otherwise it’s too obvious.

Instead, Warrant give us a riff you could bang your head to while Jani Lane calmly explains that there won’t be any heads left to bang.

That’s fucking bleak. And funny. And very rock’n’roll.

Let’s not forget the haunting children’s choir. A nod to Pink Floyd’s “We Don’t Need No Education”. When Jani Lane sings, “No more mountains no more sea”, the children’s choir sing “April 2031”, like it’s a national anthem, their Annihilation Day.

This is the band everybody remembers for “Cherry Pie.” The song became the image. The image became the stereotype. The stereotype became the punchline.

And somewhere underneath all of that was Jani Lane writing a song about environmental destruction, nuclear fallout, war, collective apathy and the possibility of a future where humanity has eliminated everything that makes life worth living.

“April 2031.”

The title sounded futuristic when the song was released. Now it sounds like a deadline.

That’s what happens when science fiction gets old. The future arrives.

We get to see which parts were ridiculous, which parts were wrong and which parts were uncomfortably close.

The song doesn’t need to predict the future perfectly to work. It only needs to make you look at the present differently.

Look up. The sky is still there. For now.

And somewhere on a 1992 Warrant record, Jani Lane was already wondering how long that would last.