Following last year’s blistering debut, Letter To Self, this follow-up by the Dublin post-punk quartet comes with title to to reflect dysfunctional, uncertain times, and an expanded musical dynamic, and fierce and reflective songs ranging from politics to philosopher to the personal. The opening two tracks are slower and quieter than the SPRINTS many are used to at their entertainingly loud live gigs, but this perhaps shows a greater confidence from them with with their producer once again - Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox. The echoing drums and piano of Abandon, or the slow menace and acoustic guitars of To The Bone seem to signal a new direction, until we hit the more familiar, thunderously explosive Descartes, a shouty philosophical treatise (“How do you heal a tortured heart? / Descartes, Descartes / Discord, discard / We have love, and we have art”), and the screaming, desperate hot and heavy desires of Need, which comes with a twist at the end, another banger with Beg, which includes the album title lyric, and Rage, which personifies the toxic voices of Trump/Farage figures (“There's a false prophet in the room / Using fear as a weaponised tool / There's a false prophet in the room / He's blaming me and he's blaming you.” Better, meanwhile, combines a quieter sound with background guitar screams, and portrays disappointment and heartbreak (“Oh, I liked you better / Oh, I liked you good and clean / Before you turned bad weather / Raged a storm inside of me.”). But some of the best songs aren’t among the singles, including Something’s Gonna Happen, a track that builds with talky intimacy and menace by frontwoman Karla Chubb, who can do this just as well as explode into rage,, capturing the mood of times: “Do you ever feel like something's gonna happen? There's a wave breaking just beneath the brim / And as the clock towers over my existence / I can feel the voices caving in …” Another very strong number is Coming Alive - a classic SPRINTS number more reminiscent of their first album, with a powerful post breakup defiance, and reminiscent in sound and power to The Walkmens’ The Rat, before the swaggering confidence of closer Desire (“The tears gleam running down in teams / I do believe I’ll lick them from your cheeks”), as six-minute epic mixing spaghetti western-style guitars with noise rock. Expanded but undimmed, a band holding onto their roots with more to explore and explode. Out City Slang.
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