When you’ve been reviewing music as long as I have, it’s easy to become jaded. Song lyrics blur into each other, chord progressions become overly familiar, the rhythms of your favourite tracks from your favourite band chugs along as if nothing’s changed.
But what happens when everything changes?
I wouldn’t say I’m a superfan of The Modern Humanitarian Sector, but I’ve been following the band since they first appeared in the mid-1990s. Down through those decades their line up has stayed pretty constant – the usual creative differences, but most of the band’s arguments have happened behind closed doors. That all changed in February 2025, when lead singer U.S. Aid left the band without warning, leaving the other members in disarray.
A lot of people – me included – thought that was the end of The Modern Humanitarian Sector. They’d already lost a lot of fans in the last few years who felt their material wasn’t speaking to the world we live in today. In an era of TikTok pop and Soundcloud rap, are people still looking for indie dinosaurs to save the industry? At this point even their most hardcore fans had pretty low expectations for the future of the band.
Those same fans were surprised in March 2025 when they announced the release of a new album, The Humanitarian Reset. Given the situation – it was already clear that U.S. Aid wasn’t coming back, having signed up for military service – the album got a lot of traction in the run-up to release. What would The Sector (as their fans call them) sound like without U.S. Aid?
When The Humanitarian Reset finally dropped, anticipation curdled into disappointment when fans discovered it was a greatest hits collection rather than a new album. The only surprising twist is that they’ve re-recorded everything from scratch, but without the participation of U.S. Aid on vocals – think of it as Humanitarian Reform (Fletcher’s Version).
The good news is that if you’re a fan of The Modern Humanitarian Sector, your favourite song is likely to be on here – but is that enough to save the band?
Track Listing:
Side A
- Put local people first
- More funding for local actors
- Increase use of pooled funds
- Reduce inefficiency
- Improve public communications
Side B
- Invest in common services
- Simplify the cluster system
- Strengthen leadership
- Eliminate turf wars
- Share information and data
Side C
- More agile response
- Focus on humanitarian action
- Drive genuine innovation
- Streamline the IASC
- Move staff to where needs are
Side D is an endless whistling void.
A fair number of these tracks are taken from their album The Grand Bargain (2016), released when the band was already sounding pretty tired. There are a handful of standout songs there, but the real bangers are from their imperial phase – The Transformative Agenda (2011) and Humanitarian Reform Agenda (2005) have so many classic tracks that it’s hard to pick faves.
You can tell the band had scored a big record deal in this stage of their career. The production values are sky-high, the lyrics have expanded thematically, and they were selling out huge venues around the world. Interviews from that period reveal that the band members were really high on their own supply. Not content with churning out crowd-pleasers, they started to think they were on a mission to save the world.
However many of their early fans felt that the same airdrop of cash had made the band lazy creatively – the feeling that maybe the money was calling the shots, rather than the musicians. You can understand why they might have felt that way when you listen to this album’s selections from their earlier releases.
Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (2004), The Sphere Project (1997), the hard-to-find EP Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda (1996) and International Code of Conduct (1994) are an unbeaten string of recordings, all put out in the space of a decade. (Wisely the compilation doesn’t include any tracks from their 1991 EP General Assembly Resolution 46/182, which even die-hard fans agree is barely listenable.)
Released on obscure indie labels, the tracks from these albums remind you why you loved this band in the first place – the idealism, the dynamism, the sense that the world could be a better place with them in it.
Yet this anthology also makes clear that by the time Tsunami Evaluation Coalition was released, the band were already struggling to say something new. In those early days of youthful idealism, the music reflected real passion, even if it was a little rough around the edges. But passion doesn’t pay the bills, and listening to those early tracks in the context of a greatest hits like this, you start to notice the musical mission creep.
Early tracks are stripped down DIY efforts, recorded in somebody’s front room somewhere, while later tracks have an everything-plus-an-orchestra-in-the-kitchen-sink feel. Partly this reflects the band’s huge ambition at a moment when they were able to command audiences with popes and presidents. This new album holds a lingering sense of that ambition – the title The Humanitarian Reset suggests that the remaining band members genuinely believe that they can start fresh on their own terms.
Ambition on its own is seldom enough to succeed. It’s not losing the star power of their lead singer that makes me think this is the end of the line. No doubt they’ll keep on gigging, pulling in money from punters anxious to relive their own past glories as much as the band’s. But this is clearly a band that has creatively run their course, and now need to get out of the way so that new sounds can emerge.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on them – after all, the trajectory of this band mirrors the trajectory of the entire music industry. Maybe if they’d waited a while and come back with something fresh – maybe even with a new lead singer – things could have been different. What we get instead is the last gasp of a band who have lost relevance, stumbling into the spotlight with what looks and feels like a cash grab. In the end, it’s the fans who’ll suffer.
I’m feeling a light to decent 3 on this one. Trans-ition. Have you given this album a listen? Did you love it? Did you hate it? What would you rate it?