The Amazons just seemed to… happen. Their 2017 debut album is imaginatively titled ‘The Amazons’, presumably because they exhausted all of their creativity in making the songs, leaving none for the album name. Regardless, it shot to the top 10, with a popularity rarely seen for British indie rock bands.
Then, there was radio silence for most of 2018, before releasing a new chart-topper with ‘Mother’, the first track off this new album, Future Dust. It took two months after that initial success before the full album was announced, to great hesitation from yours truly. Second-album syndrome is always a possibility, particularly with rock bands who turned out such a successful first album. Sometimes a rush to ride the success of a debut album leads to half-baked songs and general disappointment; sometimes the fans expect more of the same and are let down when they are served something different, and sometimes an album just isn’t very good.
Fortunately, for all involved, that isn’t the case with ‘Future Dust’.
‘Future Dust’ is a truly unique and catchy album, with frontman Matt Thomson’s vocals ranging from low to high, whilst maintaining his ‘am-I-talking-or-am-I-just-singing-flatly?’ style that gives every track a strange extra dose of flair that very few albums can keep up across an entire tracklist.
This is partly because the album keeps surprising the listener, throwing in a song like ‘25’ for instance,which relies on a prominent acoustic guitar that you keep expecting to burst into classic rock. Meanwhile, songs like ‘Fuzzy Tree’ and ‘Doubt It’ have the energy and rhythm of great festival sing-along tracks.
The crown jewel of the album is still ‘Mother’, which straddles the fast and slow dynamic with a low tempo set by drummer Joe Emmett, but killer guitar riffs from Thompson, Alderton and Briggs. I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one track from ‘Future Dust’ ends up on the soundtrack for a future season of Peaky Blinders – it’s got a place alongside the likes of Royal Blood and early Arctic Monkeys, with bombastic guitar ideal for marching through the streets of 1920’s Birmingham.
Verdict: Future Dust delivers a surprisingly wide array of sound that cements this sophomore album as an excellent entry to the 2019 charts.
4.5/5
‘Future Dust’ is out now on all platforms, and tickets for the band’s autumn tour are available online
