After leading up the most prominent indie-rock band of the Arab world, Mashrou’ Leila, the prodigious composer Hamed Sinno returns to the stage with a new project co-commissioned by Shubbak Festival and the Barbican and supported by English PEN. Poems of Consumption is a portrait of Nero, a desolate working-class melancholic crying at Whole Foods while the world outside comes to a boil. It is a literary song cycle that explores the resonances between Amazon-era consumerism, mental illness, unrequited love, and environmental collapse, without purporting to have an alternative or moral high-ground, juxtaposing the romanticism evoked by the sound of a string section, with hyper-industrial electronica created out of the sounds of consumerism.