THERE'S nothing like a cracking protest song for kicking you up the behind and dragging you out of the slough of pre-General Election despond. Suddenly you can sing, dance and get angry. And there it was last week, in the form of Captain Ska’s charts-climbing Liar Liar GE2017, a cry of anger at the untrustworthy nature of politicians, particularly our current Prime Minister. “You can’t trust her, no, no, no,” ran the chorus.

However, unless you’ve read about it on social media or from news platforms, you mightn't have heard the song, since many music stations weren't playing it. Their excuse: impartiality rules in the run-up the election. Captain Ska must have been rubbing their hands, since a ban on the song only served to increase its appeal.

Not that radio play matters too much since this clearly feels like a protest song for the online generation: made for sharing on social media, with its sampling of footage including speeches by May. This is music as Facebook era propaganda. It has the kind of chorus that gets inside your head and puts itself on repeat there, so that it’s hard to watch any politician speaking and not hear the word “liar” turning over and over.

Liar Liar GE2017 isn’t an entirely new song. Rather it’s a new version of one that Captain Ska released seven years ago, then attacking George Osborne with the words: “He’s a liar, liar.” Back then, the single only reached number 89 (Liar Liar has been hovering around the top 10), so it says something about the ferocity of feeling around this election, and also the increasing concern around lies and truth, that Liar Liar is striking such a chord now.

If there’s one thing we’re bothered about currently, it’s lies. Yes, we’re bothered about the NHS, education, immigration policy, the environment and all that, but mostly, in the era of fake news and alternative facts, lies and trust are the issues of our time.

People have always been angry, of course, about political lies. But a sense of distrust pervades all politics today. Captain Ska isn't so much an attack on May and the contradictions of the current government, it also acts as a kind of musical fact-checker, rolling out Theresa May quotes about delivering a country "for the many" alongside figures such as “3.7 million currently children live in poverty in the UK. By 2020 this figure is predicted to rise by a further million”.

This is what a protest song looks like in the era of Brexit, Trump and Facebook, during an era that often gets called “post-truth”. It's a far cry from the protest songs of the 1960s. In fact, we no longer seem to make them like we did back then – not here, or in the United States. As Joan Baez said, earlier this year: “People are waiting for a We Shall Overcome, they’re waiting for another Blowin’ In The Wind and Imagine. Hasn’t been written yet.”

But protest songs have been written in recent times. In fact over the past few years there's been an upsurge in politicised music: think of Depeche Mode’s scorching Where’s The Revolution; Gorillaz's Humanz album, a response to Trump’s election; Fiona Apple’s Women’s March chant, Tiny Hands; and all the Black Lives Matter hits, from Lauryn Hill's Black Rage through to A Tribe Called Quest’s A Space Program. Even pop singers such as Katy Perry and Lady Gaga have got a bit hazily political. And, rewind back to the Scottish independence referendum and there was Lady Alba’s hugely funny parody of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance.

The very absence of a key, shared protest song speaks volumes about our political times. It tells us that there is no universal “we” coming together to overcome, no overall sense of solidarity between groups. Rather, there are groups that are angry and fighting for themselves, and occasionally seeing a glimmer of solidarity with other groups.

Today’s songs express anger, but unlike during the 1960s, they rarely seem to pair it with hope. I’m not saying optimistic songs no longer exist – one of my favourite folk ballads of the year is the anthemic Such A Thing As Society. But they are not bubbling up to the surface of our social media driven culture.

Back in 2014, Billy Bragg, one of Britain’s greatest protest singers, observed: “The idea that popular culture should be used as a force to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable has been pushed to the margins in the 21st century." That no longer seems quite to be true. When I listen to Liar Liar GE2017, I think – here is our time’s song of anger, a reminder of what music can do.

But is it enough? After all it still feels like it’s in the margins. And it’s a reminder that we need more than anger. We need it to be combined with optimism and possibility. Let’s have a few new redemption songs. They’re what we need, after all – music to get us singing out hope.