Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change
Kyle Devine
Verso
July 2026
From protest songs to charity concerts to celebrity political endorsements on social media, pop music has long sustained its cultural legitimacy through engagement with political causes. Yet mixed results have also revealed the limits of music’s ability to shape the world outside its immediate sphere. Is music genuinely interacting with the world, or do its most profound experiences derive from emotional escapism? Award-winning author Kyle Devine argues in Recomposed that the impact of music culture has become urgently tangible.
In his previous book, Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music (2019), Devine argues that, throughout its history, recorded music has consistently been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources. Recomposed, therefore, provides a survey of a climate-oriented transformation of what music is and how it comes to be.
Devine identifies two competing visions of sustainability. The first seeks to preserve music culture more or less as it exists now: an industrialized system of production and consumption delivering an all-you-can-eat buffet of music at bargain-basement prices. The second assumes that music culture has gone too far down the path of industrialism and consumerism, and that meaningful climate action requires accepting limits: fewer concerts, fewer records, less consumption, a digital diet.
Unsurprisingly, because Recomposed focuses on key actors in the music industry’s engagement with climate change, it is largely the first group shaping the book’s narrative. Few people working within music culture are eager to reduce its scale or diminish its reach.
Part One of Recomposed addresses technical solutions. Devine presents an industry eager to make record production appear sustainable without sacrificing the standards of fidelity on which vinyl culture depends. Clampdown Records in Vancouver recycles old records into new ones, while Green Vinyl in Eindhoven manufactures records from materials more environmentally friendly than polyvinyl chloride. The emotional attachment that listeners maintain toward physical media is addressed directly in the section’s closing chapter, “Building Better Fetishes”.
Elsewhere, festival organizers and major touring acts emerge as unwilling to abandon the global scale of contemporary live music, instead seeking ways to reduce emissions without sacrificing reach. The Øya Festival in Oslo tackles transportation emissions so effectively that only two percent of attendees travel to the site by car. Coldplay pledged to reduce emissions from its world tour by 50 percent, ultimately achieving 47 percent reductions while incorporating innovations such as a kinetic dancefloor that generated electricity from audience movement.
Part Two of Recomposed shifts toward institutional solutions. Devine suggests that both independent initiatives and corporate sustainability programs frame climate responsibility as an individual obligation rather than a structural problem. Musician James Dove completed multiple climate literacy courses before founding ClimateEQ, which provides high-quality music industry consulting and training. Music conglomerates now publish annual emissions reports using Greenhouse Gas Protocol accounting standards, meaning that Spotify can declare that 99 percent of its emissions fall outside the company’s direct control.
Throughout these examples, the musicians and entrepreneurs of the “great recomposition” attempt to reconcile ecological responsibility with financial self-preservation, revealing the difficulty of pursuing climate action within market logic itself. Brian Eno co-founded EarthPercent, encouraging music industry figures to contribute a portion of their earnings to climate projects, while Australian musician Heidi Lenffer established Future Energy Artists (FEAT) as a platform for musicians to invest in solar infrastructure and receive financial returns.
Manufacturing environmentally friendly records at scale, retaining audience reach while reducing transportation emissions, and reinvesting earnings into sustainability projects all represent serious attempts to address the climate crisis within the existing structures of music culture. Yet Devine’s central argument is that it remains an illusion to believe that “fixing this warming world is simply an engineering challenge, a market failure, or a knowledge gap with correspondingly benign technical, institutional and cultural remedies.” For Devine, the climate crisis ultimately emerges from capitalism and class structure themselves, whose endless cycles of production and consumption inevitably displace environmental damage rather than resolve it.
Part Three explores cultural responses to the climate crisis. These initiatives rest on the assumption that music can still function as a meaningful form of political consciousness rather than merely an aesthetic accompaniment to catastrophe. The UK-based organization Julie’s Bicycle mobilizes artists around climate activism, arguing that culture possesses a unique capacity to inspire, persuade, and imagine alternative futures. Björk similarly engages with environmental themes through music that blends electronic instrumentation with birdsong, constructing what Devine describes as a posthumanist audiotopia that points toward new ways of existing within ecological systems.
Recomposed situates this outlook within the broader “cultural turn”: the belief that culture is a central force shaping politics, society, and everyday life. Yet Devine approaches this perspective with visible skepticism, invoking political scientist Adolph Reed Jr.’s critique that cultural politics can sometimes become worse than no politics at all.
Early in Recomposed, Devine argues that addressing the climate crisis requires people to “get involved in any socially progressive, politically active, structurally organized, ground-up radical mass movement that considers work and class.” Read in isolation, this initially struck me as a polemical distraction: anti-capitalist rhetoric welded onto the vehicle of climate change, one that risked subordinating practical climate solutions to ideological alignment.
Yet as Recomposed progresses through its technical, institutional, and cultural case studies, Devine’s politics begin to read differently. The book repeatedly returns to musicians and entrepreneurs attempting to reconcile ecological responsibility with economic survival.
By the conclusion, Devine no longer appears to be attacking the music industry from outside the framework of capital so much as tracing contradictions that emerge from within it. The tension between sustainability and consumption is not artificially imposed onto music culture by ideology; it arises organically from the material realities that sustain contemporary music itself.
Recomposed ultimately succeeds because it refuses to treat music as politically innocent or materially immaterial. Even its most idealistic forms remain entangled in systems of labour, consumption, infrastructure, and profit. Whether or not one shares Devine’s political conclusions, the book persuasively argues that music’s environmental impact cannot be separated from the economic structures that make modern music culture possible.