With continuing appeal, the experimental post-punk Leeds quartet return with their second LP, with highly entertaining, broadened musical scope, frontman James Smith’s agile, candid, conversational wit musing on the ironies of success, the music business, resultant guilt, climate change, and titular worries about the future. Co-produced by Remi Kabaka (Gorillaz) its not just sharp hip-hop/ postpunk, but oddles of funk, pop, brassy 70s disco, rippling with skit-style sampled voices, and even a touch of gospel and reggae. Opening number An Illusion already brings the full kitchen sink, predicting personal calamity and failure (“It's a Bank Holiday, so all the hospitals are shut/ Guess I'll have to saw off my own foot … I was hot property once, but now the promise is gone/ Because the roots were all rotted from the start.”) We Make Hits is a riotously danceable number parodying musical success, referencing The Fall along the way. And so the double-edged commentary continues, with restless musical energy and inventive wordplay, and many standouts, including Dream Job, the chattily environmental Fizzy Fish, but perhaps the best being the guilt-themed The Undertow, but also When The Laughter Stops (featuring Katy J Pearson and actor David Thewlis spouting Shakespeare), and that final closing number A Vineyard In The North, which, with a running worries and self-deprecation, again addresses future climate (with Smith’s young son in mind) and imagines a strange, melancholy drought-driven utopian/dystopian idea. Clever, sharply amusing, restlessly entertaining but also very pointed. Out on Universal Island.
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