The record's title comes from Boxer, the long-suffering carthorse of Orwell's *Animal Farm*, whose grim mantra of relentless toil gives the album both its name and its moral spine. It's a bold reference point, and one the band earn rather than merely borrow. Boxer's fate — worked past the point of use and then discarded — hangs over the opening third like weather. These early tracks are lean, wired, and a little desperate, guitars scraped raw and rhythms clipped tight, as though the band are playing against a clock only they can hear. You can feel the exhaustion of trying to hold down a job, a relationship, a life, while chasing something as unreasonable as a dream of making music for a living.

What elevates the record above simple confession, though, is the sound the band have built to carry it. Horn lines cut through the guitars with a brightness that recalls ska's community-hall warmth as much as anything from the indie canon, while breakbeats needle their way under the choruses, giving tracks a nervous, propulsive energy that never settles into predictability. Then there's the poetry — spoken interludes and half-sung asides that thread through the record like a second narrator, someone standing just off to the side of the songs, commenting on the action. It shouldn't work as neatly as it does, but producer Matt Terry, fresh from his work with The Enemy and The Clause, has clearly understood exactly what to sand down and what to leave jagged.

The transformation across the record's arc is the real achievement here. By the album's back half, the tension of those opening tracks has given way to something warmer and more communal. The last five songs are built for rooms full of people, choruses broad enough to be shouted back at the stage, melodies that invite a crowd rather than a lone listener. It's a clever piece of sequencing: the record doesn't just describe the grind of chasing a dream, it enacts the payoff, moving from isolation towards togetherness track by track until the whole thing tips over into something close to euphoria.

This is a band who understand that hope means more when it's been earned through hardship rather than assumed from the start. *I Will Work Harder* takes its cue from a fictional horse worked to death for a cause that never repaid him, and turns that bleak parable into something like a rallying cry — proof that graft, however punishing, can still lead somewhere worth arriving at. Few records this year will feel as lived-in, or as generous with what they've learned along the way.