The Specials, Encore (Universal/Island) ****

IN their ska revival days at the turn of the Eighties, The Specials favoured black and white album covers to match the check-board 2-Tone Records insignia.

Now, on their first new studio album since 1980's More Specials, Encore goes for white lettering against a grey background, although the grey is restricted to the whiskers of reconvened founder members Terry Hall, who turns 60 next month; Lynval Golding, 67, and bassist Horace Panter, 65, (whose dayglo Pop Art often can be seen at York's According To McGee gallery, by the way).

Last year they were joined in a London recording studio by their touring band members of the past few years, Nikolaj Torp Larsen on keyboards; Ocean Colour Scene guitarist and Paul Weller wingman Steve Cradock; ska/reggae veteran Kenrick Rowe on drums and the all-important brass blast of Tim Smart on trombone and tuba and Pablo Mendelssohn on trumpet.

Anyone attending The Specials' retro November 2016 show would not have envisaged such a recording, but the chance to mark 40th anniversary of their 1979 debut album prompted the welcome burst of creativity from the pioneering Coventry bands, one of the great political forces of British music.

In this rotten age of interminable Brexit bust-ups and bickering, rising racism and homelessness and a greater than ever divide between the wealthy and the poor – how, in all conscience, can anyone justify distinguishing poverty from "absolute poverty"? – the dearth of politico pop is bewildering. Where is a new Costello, Bragg or Weller? Or a new Specials, arguably our greatest ever political band?

York Press:

Special delivery: the return of a powerful poltical musical force

Step forward the reactivated Specials, re-formed but not reformed, dark, agitated and unforgiving, demanding change with the opening burst of a new take on The Equals' Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys, Golding's Linton Kwesi Johnson-styled B.L.M. (Black Lives Matter) and the single Vote For Me, the Ghost Town of this new set.

Long-absent principal songwriter and arranger Jerry Dammers is still elsewhere, as he has been been ever since The Specials re-grouped a decade ago, yet his 1984 album, The Special AKA's In The Studio holds as much influence over Encore as the spiky earlier albums.

A deadpan reworking of The Fun Boy Three's The Lunatics in a Dammers style reaffirms how indeed the lunatics have taken over the asylum yet again and is all the more potent for that; 10 Commandments' guest vocal by Saffiyah Khan recalls Rhoda Dakar's equally uncompromising The Boiler while asserting women's rights by rewriting a sexist Prince Buster ska oldie, and the Golding/Hall knife-crime duet Embarrassed By You could not be more topical.

Hall, whose mental health issues were writ large in his disconcerting Barbican performance, is nevertheless singing better than ever and has several high points here, from the social-media mocking Breaking Point to the spoken-word candour of The Life And Times Of A Man Called Depression.

The closing We Sell Hope maybe as melancholic as latter-day Madness but "hope" is the key here, and nothing offers more hope than Encore going to number one in its week of release. This is a message to you, a rude re-awakening that The Specials still matter. Be sure to be there at York Barbican on May 9.

Charles Hutchinson