“It's deliberately very succinct and straight to the point,” says Courting’s Sean Murphy-O'Neill of the band’s latest, and third, album. “We wanted to keep everything incredibly direct – to hit everyone in the face and leave.”
Lust for Life, Or: ‘How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story’
is an album full of dualities, contrasts and contradictions. It contains some of the most straight-up pop music the band have ever made, but it’s also arguably their most experimental work to date. It is fun and silly, peppered with in-jokes, references, and easter eggs, but it is detailed, deeply considered, and masterfully produced and mixed. “It's meant to feel very contradictory and confusing but it’s also fully realised,” Murphy-O’Neill says. “It’s a real culmination of things. ”
The album title may be a sprawling mouthful but it belies its contents, with this containing just eight perfectly considered and pristinely executed songs. “I’ve always wanted a big, ridiculous title,” says Murphy-O’Neill. “I love albums that have a very self-important vibe. Lust for Life is such an overused title but it's a great one. It could be referencing so many things, from Iggy Pop to Lana Del Ray and maybe that's kind of its whole schtick – it’s as equally as influenced by 70s proto-punk as it is modern pop. It just all melts together. Everything we do is like a collage. We just take all the things we like and blend them together.”
This is what has made the Liverpool band – made up of Murphy-O’Neill, Sean Thomas, Joshua Cope, and Connor McCann – such a unique proposition in recent years. Over three albums and one EP in just three years, they have shown they can do unashamed indie bangers with as much flair as they can pull off jittery hyperpop or innovative electronic rock. “It's equally gratifying to write something that is as big and stupid as it is to write something really weird,” says Murphy-O’Neill. “As a band we exist in those two separate worlds at the same time.”
Encompassing, as well as delivering, such distinct sonic worlds is one of the things that has made the band such an arresting outfit. For 2024’s New Last Name, the band went big and theatrical, overloading on style, themes and ideas, by turning the album into an ostensible play. So this time they wanted a smaller approach. “I was bored of overthinking that kind of stuff,” says Murphy-O’Neill. “I just wanted to make something immediate. There's no shit around it. It is what it is. Something more initiative focused.”
However, as is always the case with Courting, a great deal of thought has gone into this record despite its immediacy and direct hit approach. In many ways, it’s a record that came to Murphy-O’Neill as a complete package in his head and then it was just a case of piecing it together. “We had the title and the artwork idea before we had the songs,” he says. “But I knew what all the songs should be called, how many songs there should be, how they should be structured, and then I just made songs that fit into that. I don't really know how to write a song for an album that doesn't serve a purpose.”
Further themes around duality are reflected via this approach too. The album artwork is black and white (two colours) and features two figures on a motorbike (two wheels). The even number
of eight tracks is also crucial. “All of the songs on the album have a twin song, symmetrically,” Murphy-O’Neill explains. So, the opening ‘Intro’, with a beautiful motif of looping strings, is repeated on the album’s closer ‘Likely place for them to be’ but this time played with a sharp buzz of electric guitar.
The album’s second track, ‘Stealth Rollback’ is a literal rollercoaster of a song that runs the gauntlet from Prodigy-esque rave via Death Grips-like noise before landing on something more akin to an experimental reinterpretation of The Small Faces. “I think the cliche for me would be starting a song off very peacefully and twisting it into something harsh and electronic,” Murphy-O’Neill explains. “So we started it incredibly harshly and just kicked everyone in the teeth.”
‘Eleven Sent (This Time)’ is about as breezy and infectious a piece of melodic indie pop as you’re likely to come across all year, while ‘Pause at You’ sounds like it may have come out of a NYC loft in the early 2000s. Agitated guitar melds with a killer bassline groove to produce a bouncing and invigorating piece of dance punk that, in true Courting style, then mushrooms into something else for its soaring chorus. ‘Namcy’ is a perfect example of how in the midst of an album so bursting with variety, the band can also produce just a straight-down-the-line and simply undeniably great rock song, with guitar lines and melodic hooks that will bounce around your head for days.
The two-part narrative of ‘Lust for Life’ represents a song that Murphy-O’Neill is very proud of. “I think it might be the best song we've ever written,” he says, of the six-plus minute track, which shifts from an eerie, sparse, almost Berlin-era Bowie opening segment, but with mangled auto-tune, before shifting into a different beast altogether. “It's about a credit card scam,” he explains.
That song does a lot to me. I find it quite touching.” That song, and this album as a whole, feels like a real milestone moment for the band. “We've hit expectations but we've also subverted them,” Murphy-O’Neill says. “It does feel like an end to something, but I'm not really sure what. It's really all come together on this one and maybe that's why it feels final. I don't know if it's the end of an era but it feels like everything that I've ever done has all culminated together in this one record.”
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Event Venue
The Grove, The Grove, Newcastle Upon Tyne, EN, United Kingdom
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