The Alarm - Transformation

Transformation is the last record Mike Peters made, wrote and recorded in the final months of his life, and it refuses to sound like a farewell.

The Alarm were born in Rhyl, Wales, in the early 1980s with punk urgency and arena-worthy choruses, and Peters spent four decades as their constant, the voice behind Sixty Eight Guns. He also spent nearly thirty of those years living with cancer, first lymphoma, then leukemia, and turned that into the Love Hope Strength Foundation, which held donation drives at concerts and put tens of thousands of people on bone marrow donor registries. Richter syndrome took him away in 2025, and he wrote and recorded this album while fighting it, finishing the work before leaving.

New Life opens the album exactly where its title suggests, all propulsion and no self-pity, and Live Today became the last video Peters shot, giving an already straightforward song an almost unbearable weight. To Be Alive is the most reflective part of the record, and In Unity does what The Alarm has always done best, turning a personal struggle into something an entire crowd can sing along to.

Twelve songs, made in circumstances that would have stopped most people, and each of them looks to the future. That was always the main idea.