Festive Greetings from This Is Not Happening and welcome to our year-end, 2025 wrap-up episode. As always we split the pod into Part 1 and Part 2.Part 1 features our Top 10 favourite albums of 2025. We use a proprietary algorithm to create our list our collective favourite albums, we're talking nascent data-science excellence! Every year it throws up some surprises as our tastes are so different (and in some ways so similar.Part 2 features a festive Spin It or Bin It. We each bring a candidate for track of the year and ask the age old question 'Spin It or Bin It' … will anyone really bin anyone elses Track of the Year? Probably.To retain the tension, I won't share any spoilers here … other than to share a 40 track playlist of some of our favourite 2025 tracks … here.Whatever you do at this time of year, who ever you do it with … have a good one.Please join us in January where we will go back to the usual format of Album of the Month + Spin It or Bin It.We've been writing the blog for years come and have a look – https://thisisnothappening.net/
We are officially 62 months old. Welcome to the latest episode of This Is Not Happening, an album of the month podcast.
In Part 1, we review and Album of the Month. This month Guy brings back an artist that we first featured in early 2022, Joy Crookes. Joy is tackling the tricky 2nd album syndrome with her latest release ‘Juniper’.
In Part 2, we play Spin It or Bin It, we pick a theme and all pick songs that represent that theme. This month, we stick with theme of ‘Joy’ and ask each other to brings tracks that bring us joy and happiness.
—–Part 1 | Joy Crookes | Juniper —–
In January 2022 we reviewed Joy’s debut Skin. The consensus was that we loved it and it became a very important and deeply album for some of us. In terms of expectations, the bar was raised when Joy released the single ‘Pass the Salt’ in January of this year.
So what did we get with this sophomore release? Well, a lot is the simple answer! Perhaps not a big leap stylistically but a massive long-jump forwards in terms of song writing and performance. Will that be enough for the pod … have a listen and tell us what you think.
Watch a great reaction video from Jakar right … HERE
Read a great interview with Joy in Glamour magazine … HERE
Listen to a deeply personal and revealing interview … HERE
—–Part 2 | Spin It or Bin It | ‘Joy’ —–
Songs that bring us ‘Joy and Happiness’ sounds like a simple theme to find music for … well, not for one of us who revels in the dark and miserable side of music. The selections are predictably brilliant!
Yes, Joy is back, and isn’t that a good thing to say?
It was way back in January 2022 in Episode 19 that we first welcomed the south Londoner to the podcast, and I’ve been anticipating her next move ever since her brilliant debut, Skin, found its way into my life. That album – Crookes was already hyped and was nominated for the Brit Rising Star award in 2020 – truly put Crookes on the map, a heady mix of twenty-something south London life as a mixed-race women – growing up with an Irish father and Bangladeshi mother – painting nights out wrapped in cigarette smoke and JD and cokes, the 35 bus, parties, family, flirting and love, all set against deeper topics of mental health struggles, identity and nods to the good and bad of multicultural Britain. Trading on smoky soul, r’n’b, 60s pop, dancehall, as much of a melting pot as the city she calls home. It won the then 22 year old plaudits and a Mercury prize nomination.
It was a firm favourite in Hornsby towers; songs are still on my daughter’s playlist. It has been in my life ever since, a post-Covid breath of fresh air that seemed to have London as a backing singer, reminding me fondly of the place I called home for over two decades. The album was toured relentlessly over the next two years, with talk of new material in the studio, as well as Crookes’ appearance at fashion shows, festivals and even a Lexus advert, enjoying her new-found fame and bringing her own down-to-earth energy wherever she was. It was hard not to see her having the time of her life and not be there vicariously with her. And I wasn’t begrudging one single moment. She was the star we could all get behind.
But where was the new music I hoped for? It took until January of this year when Pass The Salt dropped: a new single, as yet decoupled from any expectation of a new album. And it felt fresh. Tricking us with a filtered soul intro, before dropping into heavy-drummed and bass-driven verse which felt like a statement of intent: “listen to this / I’ve got plenty to get off my chest.” Joy was back, but where had she been? This was a different tip to her smoky, ballsy, fun-filled sound of 2022. This was more weighty, direct, and pointed to a hardening of the now 26 years old artist: “I got thick skin on these bones, ah / When a bitch don’t rise to rumour / Get the words stuck in your throat, throat, throat”. It also featured a rasping verse from Compton native Vince Staples, elevating it and nudging away from expectations in under three minutes. As a comeback, it asked questions: what was next, what did Joy have to say this time, and was there an album coming soon too?
A second single followed soon after, again with a big name verse to shift thinking further: this time enlisting grime superstar and actor Kano for his verse in Mathematics. A more soul standard track this time, but with the grime OG’s vulnerable words standing out with power and poignancy alongside Crookes’ lyrics and pushing things forward (as well as starring in a memorable video for the release, below). On the surface, it felt like a song about unrequited love, but it also felt like something heavier loomed in the background. It raised the interest of both new directions, and what lay behind Crookes’ next step. After third single – the up-tempo pop of ‘I Know You’d Kill‘ in March – I finally got the news I was hoping for: a new album, Juniper, was due in September, almost four years to the day from her debut. It felt a long time, and as the media rounds started for that release, things became clear that it hadn’t been a simple ride for Crookes since she got on the hamster wheel.
For all the joy of the new record – to which we’ll come – there’s significant context to Juniper’s journey from studio to airwaves. In the middle of her rush of fame, things fell apart. The late nights and VIP rooms had been fun as she found her way up through the next tiers of the industry, but it all felt disconnected, causing Crookes to step away and question what was important to her. Talking to Grace Dent in her Comfort Eating podcast, she laid bare how hard it had hit her: “.…it was a very dark time. I was extremely unwell. Not in a good place. I had to face those mental health issues: after the high, I flew down. I was lonely and isolated, like I had no connection to anyone.” If it all sounds bleak, it was. Right at the point where she should be releasing a second album, there was questions around her own health, and whether it would actually happen.
While plainly laid out in its lyrics – opener Brave is an early statement: “I’m so sick, I’m so tired I can’t keep losing my mind / I want to be brave, I want to be in love / It’s time I stopped running away. I should stay” – Crookes had to contemplate confronting the reality of where her head was at to even get to the studio. Telling DIY mag: “Touring and everything is a great distraction but I obviously had something bubbling up for years in the background I’d decided not to deal with, mentally.” Sparked by coming out of a relationship, she realised her behaviours “were actually traits of someone with very specific traumas”. She had to choose between the party and her soul, and it came down to an easy choice, but a harder road: “you can fuck around, but the play time’s gonna end at some point. No more Alaïas or Tabis, you’re gonna have to put on your fuckin’ Salomons and go on the hike!” It’s what makes the joy of Juniper even greater, given what was overcome.
I’d already been playing the singles to death through the summer – the fast-paced 60s pop of I Know You’d Kill (penned about her love for her brilliant female manager) and the sultry Carmen, eschewing the simple love and loss for the myth of unattainable beauty – and they continued to come thick and fast. The modern trait of releasing half the album in tracks that’ll get the airplay and streaming numbers does dilute the mystery of the long player. But what was revealed early didn’t remove too much from the final product. It was so good to see Crookes back, and I was ready to play Juniper on repeat on day one, enjoying how much the singles change feeling as part of a greater whole.
It was such a bright, accessible listen. Crookes always had a skill for enveloping, classy soul and pop that – whatever the subject matter – you could tap and dance too, and her own vibrancy came through in every line. Brave’s dusky overtones were classic Crookes, but it felt laced with sadness: “Sometimes it’s hard to smile / When no hurt feels against us”, the vocals as rich and heady as ever, with its tales of love and the fear laying yourself open to someone else. Her wider palette of influences – not just Nina Simone or Sarah Vaughan, but also the first wave of Bristol’s trip-hop scene and Joy Division – seep into the album, and the first half of singles-heavy tracks, reward with layers. Flying through Pass The Salt – a track that sees Crookes call out an ‘arsehole woman’ who’d spread rumours about her – and Carmen‘s playful musings on beauty and expectation. Flitting effortlessly between genres and styles that revolve around her London soul and street sounds, she plays on her heritage – Perfect Crime’s video was shot in her mother’s homeland of Bangladesh, with Crookes goofing around on the river and the back of motorbikes, seemingly happy to be out of the other side of her trauma – and confidently wears it on her sleeve.
There are more musical departures that nod to a widening of horizons, too. For all of some reviewers seeing First Last Dance as a more derivative dance/pop track, it’s a firm favourite of mine already, and shows a willingness to move away from the template (and features one of my favourite lyrics on the album – ‘Feel like Travolta / Each time I hold ya’. And far from a breezy theme, like much of the album, it had a deeper narrative, relaying the anxiety felt during the recording process. As she told DIY Mag,“I was like, ‘my chest at the moment, you know that scene where they stab [Mia Wallace] with the needle because she’s taken way too much cocaine?’ They were like ‘yeah?’ and I was like, ‘well, that’s how it feels’.” She grins. “They were like ‘well, that’s a lyric!’”.
The production on the album really worked too. It was – to me – a bit more varied, but warm, full of layers, and above all, sat back to let Crookes’ voice shine through. The two work in harmony, and there feels like an added richness to her voice too, with a few years (and a few cigarettes) more, it’s so full of character. The album was a blend of studio talent: Blue May, her most regular partner, producing Skin before this record, was back. Harvey Grant also returned, having worked with Arlo Parks previously too. Tev’n – a collaborator with Stormzy – debuted, as did Chrome Sparks. With Crookes finding a way to blend al of this together, it sounds fantastic, but never overdone.
Of all the tracks that have found their way into my head, Somebody To You is the album’s zenith to me. Perhaps the simplest song on the record, it just aches with sadness and thoughtfulness (and features a sublime Sam Fender on backing vocals). Alongside the companion video, it feels like a classic love song, but once again the truth is more uncomfortable than that. Talking to Glamour magazine, she told how it actually hints at a familial relationship that had broken down in the interim and caused Joy to rethink what her life looks like without her reliance on that relative. And that also points to a bigger narrative about being a woman: “It’s such an important question for women trying to define their full adult selves outside of relationships that no longer serve them,” Crookes said, nodding to the line “‘Who am I when I’m out of your sight? I want to see how we look apart”, as “what the album really is about.”
The themes may more broadly always bring in love in all its raw detail – Perfect Crime’s title nods to the joy love after heartbreak – and Mathematics tells of unrequited love, with its verse recorded secretly by Kano, so moved was he by the song, and A House With A Pool, a tale of an abusive ex-partner and for Crookes “a shit year when I ground myself down into the smallest version of myself”. At each turn, there is something deeper running through Juniper than simple heartbreak. Where Skin was as much about love, identity, family and a love letter to her south London homeland, Juniper feels closer, more introspective.
It’s the sound of an artist that has grown up in the spotlight, suffered and questioned the outcomes of the very thing she loves, and come back to her centre of family and friends, to find connection and a way out of the trough. She is willing to put it all out there, and there’s a bravery and determination that makes Juniper rise above the simple follow-up on the same template and marks a step forward. Closer Paris muses on the effect of a relationship with another woman, Crookes calling out “one of the best songs I’ve ever done.” There’s a freedom to her admission that it didn’t matter to her being with someone rather than worrying about her internal voice’s worries: “Kinda wanted you to be my girlfriend / Didn’t wanna fuck with no more Catholic guilt / When it comes to pride / I’d raise my heart to a girl or guy”. It feels a distance from the person she was then, a willingness to embrace the emotion. I was stood in the crowd at Glastonbury in 2022 when she wept tears of joy at where she’d come to, and I think of that now and where this album will take her, a smile on my face.
Despite so much of the record being underpinned her exposure to fame and its pitfalls, it’s never painted in a morose or self-involved way. She is willing to reveal warts and all, and call out her own failings as much as her struggles. The tunes soar so well, and her lyrics are so sharp, clever, and zippy, that you feel you are always on Crookes’ side, even as she’s telling you her darkness of the past few years, while asking you not to pity her. She values her ‘reset’, and the people around her, from her family and pre-fame friends, to her manager Charlotte Owen, for whom I Know You’d Kill is a celebration of. There’s something beautiful about the fierce independence of two women, fighting back in an industry built on the male gaze.
As much as the subject matter weighs – and rightly so – on Juniper, it doesn’t flatten the melodies, and it’s also possible to let the album wash over you, dancing to the sound, as much as deep listening, headphones on, and taking in all of its majesty under the surface. And albums working on two levels are what we all love, right?
What Juniper gives me is a follow-up from a British songwriter of class, wit and honesty that feels every bit as good as the debut, with four more years of life, emotion, understanding and recovery poured into it. For all the struggles that Crookes has gone through, her determination to come out of the other side and bring that through to us in her music is a gift for all of us. In her early releases, there may have been lazy ‘next Winehouse’ comparisons, but I can’t think of another artist like her around, so steeped in London, and the clash of cultures that have made her who she is. We are lucky to have her and I hope you’ll see some of what I feel about Juniper in your own experience.
It’s about time, really. 21 episodes in and I’d been waiting for a new Metronomy album to arrive so we could finally cover it on the podcast. Disclosure: there’s no point in pretending otherwise, but I’ve been an unashamed fan since the blog started in the dim and distant 2010s, and in my mind, they’re a band that should fit right into the middle of our sprawling Venn diagram, so I was surprised to find out that Joey and Nolan weren’t nearly as familiar with them as I thought. Challenge accepted: at least as with many things, I have Pop Being David for company here. But I still wavered, with February’s avalanche of great new music from the likes of pod favourite Mitski, psych rock Animal Collective, Trentemoller as as well as heralded new year picks from Bonobo and Yard Act. In the end though, I couldn’t pass this up. I’d have kicked myself. And when I second guess myself I end up in the Talvin Zone ™.
My love affair with Joe Mount’s musical outfit began as it did for many, back in 2011 with their third album: The English Riviera. Its the record that really ‘broke’ the band, with its wry take on life and love in the English south coast and Mount’s home town of Totnes in Devon. Along with headline-grabbing singles The Bay and The Look came tales of small-town ennui, love, loss and introspection, all played out on a canvas of synths, crisp percussion, guitar licks and funk bass, and I was smitten. Yes, they were clearly a pop outfit, but they crept into the far more interesting territory of ‘alternative’ British pop music that had something to say, and an intriguing way to say it. For all the chart-ready vibrancy of the singles, there also sat musical beauty and character from the likes of Some Written’s soft tones, sultry funk of We Broke Free and the kaleidoscopic closer Love Underlined. It marked out a step up for the four-piece, whose line-up had been reworked and for whom Mount, as the driving force was proving his rare talents as – in my eyes at least – one of the country’s best singer-songwriter-producers.
I have very specific memories of the album too. I came to love it in the slightly surreal surroundings of Monaco. Having ligged onto a trip to the Grand Prix weekend with friends David and Will that worked in the feeder GP2 series, I was listening to its unfurling eleven tracks on the actual Riviera. I feel that Joe Mount would’ve enjoyed that irony (hi Joe, if you’re reading). So I’m always treated to both a really vivid recollection of the surroundings I was in, and a hark back to the start of my love affair with the band. I’ve not been back to Monaco since, but then I don’t need to. I just fire up the strings in that opening and I’m there. That led me to their underrated predecessor, Nights Out, which had its own idiosyncratic attraction, less so to the bedroom debut guitar/synth mish-mash Pip Paine (Pay The £5000 You Owe), but from which a lineage through to their later albums could still be traced. I gorged on the lot. I had found a band that I could love in the same universe at Hot Chip and LCD, one that took a more mainstream template and bent it to their own shape.
Before 2022, David actually chose their last album – the excellent Metronomy Forever – as one of our monthly picks in the ‘before times’ of 2019, but it’s a surprise searching back through the archives that it appears the only time we’ve done it, (though I’m convinced we did pick the English Riviera back in the proto-blog days of Posterous, at least as something we all listened to). It’s been a joy waiting for each album to come out, from the 60s-pop window of Love Letters, through the out and out punch of Summer 08‘s window to the pre-English Riviera years, through to the precursor to Small World, the more sprawling and interesting Metronomy Forever. Every one of them has brought new songs to love, new skills to marvel at, and an ever-growing adoration for Mount’s skills. All the while he’s been behind Metronomy’s success, he’s a modest but brilliant producer whose work’s been part of output by everyone from Robyn to thecocknbullkid and remixing everyone from Gorillaz, Goldfrapp and Lady Gaga, while being a big element in the supergroup of production talent on early pod favourite Jessie Ware’s ‘What’s Your Pleasure’?
Enter: Small World. Timing is everything, and many great albums from artists we love have missed the window for an AOTM: Caribou, Roisin Murphy, in recent times stood out here. So I have gambled somewhat on giving ourselves a compressed sixteen days from release to record, with this post coming only ten days in. We’ve had some albums for ten times that before now. But we’ve already had a taster in the shape of two excellent singles – Things Will Be Fine and It’s Good To Be Back (check the videos that top and tail this post) – to grace the start of 2022. An album of 9 songs over thirty-five minutes should be easy to gorge on. I just hope that it won’t be too short a time to hit that magic mark where you really fall for a record. After all, I showed with The Weather Station that it’s easy to be unsure when we record and to have changed your mind by the time we put the episode’s out. A very first world problem.
But I needn’t have worried, because Small World is an absolute joy, stripping back the layers while extolling the simple pleasures in life after the great reset we all felt. But it is also a marked departure. Musically, it’s still clearly tres Metronomy but there are some significant, if intriguing changes to the normal synth-pop template. The main one of these is the synths: they’re not absent, but very much on the fringes, something that feels unheard of for the band, and that may risk rubbing lots of fans right up the wrong way.
In fact, on the record sleeve – and I gloried in the vinyl here, something I’ve started most days working from home with in the background – Mount stated that the idea was to have none on the record, only piano and hammond organ. And a brilliant quote on their Instagram that’s both serious and self-deprecating that sums up the band in many ways: “I thought I’d like to do something musical, that isn’t very electronic…. someone taking themselves a bit seriously and thinking they should do a Nashville record. It’s almost a midlife crisis”. It’s funny because it just is, but also because Joe Mount is entering mid life. And while it doesn’t quite work out as synth-free, piano and acoustic guitars are very much a running motif of the album, from the cascading melody in the slow-burn opener Life and Death.
The tone is set from the off as one of change: middle age, family, introspection, anxiety, growing old. All things we’ve seen many times from artists that have gone from loose-limbed twenty-somethings to 40-somethings, looking back on their youth and forward into the future, but for Mount, whose musical character has been so steeped in pop and its youthful slant, this is something that comes with risk. And it’s album that’s much more personal, as he admitted in a recent excellent interview with DIY mag. “I’ve always thought that pop music is for teenagers, and I’ve always thought that I make pop music. So if what I do doesn’t interest those people, then I’m not doing very well.“
In Life and Death, there’s a bleakness to the lyrics that runs through the album at times, as Mount, far more than before, shifts from love, loss, parties and an ironic twist on English life to move himself towards the centre of the action: “It was fun what I did / Got a job, had some kids / See you in the abyss”, both perhaps a personal state of mind but also a reference to the two years the album took shape in, one where we all got more accustomed to both life and death itself. Not perhaps the sound of a content man, but it’s never quite clear with Metronomy how much is for lyrical effect and how much is real, because his relocation to the country and his first purpose-built studio has found him far more balanced with the life of a parent pop star than he’s sounded in years.
Trying to ascertain the feel for a new album is tricky. It takes time and investment, and there’s a (pleasing) bump in the road with Small World where, after the opener, the two singles then come in succession. Taken in isolation – they are almost the two tracks most out of step with the album’s palette. But when they sit in the first side of the 9 tracks, they actually take on a different hue. Things Will Be Fine’s nod to teenage angst (caused by the film that shocked many in this country, Raymond Briggs’ harrowing When The Wind Blows) can’t stay in the darkness too long: “I might save the day, i might change the world… Things will be fine“. It also referred to a mantra Mount was telling his children through the last two years, blending real life into the band’s more oblique metaphors of the past, and accompanied by a brilliant video that harks back to each of the band at 15). And its breezy guitar strums very much out of the 60s pop mould push things along, in a way that wouldn’t feel out of place on Love Letters. It’s Good To Be Back’s infectious lightness also is hard to avoid (along with the brilliant, strange video, a medium the band have always enjoyed to great effect since The Look). It’s the song that stuck in my head through January, but it’s after this opening salvo where things get interesting. It’s not diminishing those tracks, but ultimately, the lead singles will always feel a little incongruous when you’ve gorged on them before the album arrives.
It may be reductive to paint Small World’s change in tone as reducing the band’s strengths (and some have crudely done that) but I’ve found the album to be a continually rewarding and engaging experience, and it’s down to the subtle shifts in direction and style throughout that provide this again and again. There’s an argument that I definitely acknowledge, that when you strip away the synths and the bounce of so many of their previous tracks, that there’s potential exposure of some lyrical lack of adventure that Metronomy have been painted with the past. I see that. But it’s also doing a disservice to the beauty of the melodies and the near-perfection arrangements in this record too. Plenty of great pop music doesn’t need to be profound or lyrically mesmerising. Simply saying ‘this isn’t like Salted Caramel Ice Cream‘ is just stating a fact. To me, either you love Metronomy in all their forms or perhaps you rethink what your musical directions are. I mean, this is hardly Kid A here. Many of these songs could slot into an existing album without much effort, it’s just the whole narrative that feels different. But as much as many of their albums to date, this feels fully formed and whole.
Continuing the A-side (sorry, mp3 crew), Loneliness on the Run’s 90s-esque intro of plucked bass makes me think of Weezer and the yesteryear US-garage indie scene, but soars into a different space from its harmonies, adding a sprinkle of light in a starry melody in the break. Even as it moves along, there are unmistakably familiar splashes in each song. And vocal harmonies are a BIG, beautiful part of the record, elevating what feel like more formulaic tracks to something much more beautiful. If pianos are one motif, then acoustic guitars and harmonies are very much the other two in the triumvirate of what Small World does differently.
In the middle of it all, sits my album favourite: Love Factory. There’s a real 70s/80s AOR vibe on it, with its vocal interplay – not hard to see the lineage from Mount’s love of the likes of Steely Dan to this moment – and its treatment of love as something perhaps less romantic and spontaneous but ‘churned out’. There’s irony here – as the protagonist tries to show his usefulness in the face of the ‘factory’ production line – but the melody carries the song along on a cloud. Lyrically, it’s perhaps the simplest and most straightforward of the album but Mount’s talked about the song being ‘relentless’ here, with its looped melody and listing verses. But the fuzz guitar and circular piano phrases have had me woken up in the night singing its notes. That is hard to reject.
Lost My Mind is an interesting curveball, even as it shares some familiarity. The literal and metaphorical losing of one’s mind in the pandemic: ‘how friends of ours in quite different situations were just in apartments, on their own, feeling very isolated and out of touch‘ was another quite personal statement from Mount. But the music really evoked something specific in me. I felt a real Bowie energy here, with a sprinkling of Eno in the strange choral/vox synth chords, before the piano wig-out that closed the song. It really is hard to shake that feel, so I am fascinated if any of the group’s Bowie antennae felt similarly tweaked. At the other end of the pendulum, Right On Time (complete with a suitably daft skydiving video) urges us to try and ‘enjoy the sunshine’, even as we all sat in Covid-gloom. That even while things were scary and sad, there are simple pleasures we can take in.
The album closes with two more intriguing tracks. The first is a rare guest on the album outside the Metronomy universe: Hold Me Tonight sees Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin join into what is arguably the most straightforward love song on the record. A tale of desperation and hope, unrequited love as Mount’s verses. It’s a relatively breezy 90s-esque indie pop jangler until Margolin’s striking vocals enter at the halfway mark: ‘so you found the courage / do you regret it yet / it’s not what you wanted / but I guess it’s off your chest’. I think it’s a fascinating dynamic where the male vocal is higher than the female, and less powerful, playing with the balance on literal and metaphorical levels. And a song that was a totally different slant, almost binned and then resurrected when Mount sent it to Dana for her input, turning it into a desolate and unexpected response. It’s a masterstroke of serendipity. I’ve listened to it so many times – and as someone that’s not really come across much of Porridge Radio – and I can’t quite place who the vocal makes me recall. I’d want to say Robert Smith but that doesn’t feel quite right. But it’s a definitely welcoming development and one of the standout tracks.
Closer I Have Seen Enough I first thought was a bleak tale of a failed marriage – we can watch the flowerbeds rising / Each year our children grow / I will sit with you in silence / As we watch our favourite show” – but it’s much less specific than that, of course echoing the pandemic, but also again urging us to enjoy the small, simple things in life. For a song that’s quite slow and maudlin, it’s quite the sleight of hand, actually having such a positive message. It’s also odd that it was originally planned to be sung in French. Mais non.
In living with this album almost endlessly for the last ten days, I’m naturally concerned that I’m going to be prejudiced not only by my own gasping adoration for the band, but also a need to step back and try and gain some perspective away from the churn of dozens (twenty now? more?) of listens that have made me love it more. But I could easily burn it out, and by the time we record (in a week) be sick of it. Or at least see it lose its lustre and perhaps edge closer to some of the ‘yeah, it’s lovely but….’ critical responses. But right now, it’s an album I can’t put down. And having waited three years since its predecessor, and seen such a departure, it feels much more like one whose ‘woah’ softens with each listen, and by now, just feels as Metronomy as ever. It also makes me wonder where their next album will go, and feel already excited about that.
I wonder what the others will make of it. I suspect I may be flying a lone flag here. I know brother @davidhallison is a big fan of the band, and should really like this, but I’m not so sure. And as the record approaches, it always gets more shaky when it’s a band you adore. Is it – as it has from others first reactions – ‘not Metronomy enough’? And for @misterstory and @nolankane706, perhaps too much of a departure from all those Metronomy bangers of the past? But I really do think this is an album – and that’s what we’re here for aren’t we? – that works as well as any of their previous ones as an entity. It is quintessentially English, has a theme, is perfectly short, and taut, arranged beautifully, and makes me want to go for another listen again and again (even if I have to turn the record over, at least I’m getting out of my chair). I may not convince everyone of this. But perhaps I don’t have to. I’m happy with it. Things will be fine.
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