For all the UK’s political earthquakes, we still live in an age when creative social comment seems to be strangely absent. Life at the sharp end defines all that poverty-porn TV; the class system is a pervasive subtext of the just-returned X Factor. But where are this era’s topical plays, novels and albums? Part of the answer lies with a prolific Nottingham-based duo called Sleaford Mods, whose clattering tales of jobcentres, dead-end work, awful hangovers and endless failure – all based on direct experience – have heeded the call. Their records are financed by a local bus driver, but their latest album, Divide and Exit, has been widely acclaimed. Perhaps, however, it is for the best that this week it was not nominated for the Mercury prize, which carries with it a supposed career-ending curse (witness, say, Gomez, who got the gong and cheque in 1998). Then again, if they had won, they would have got more of their gloriously raw art out of it.