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Alt-rock band Dinosaur Pile Up take on Future Yard in May 2027. After a 6 year hiatus, the band released their fifth album “I’ve felt better”, which started as a makeshift mantra of frontman’s Matt Bigland after a long battle with ulcerative colitis.Unwilling to sift through the layers of trauma with every friend who checked-in to see how he was doing – indeed, often unable to speak through a mouth filled with centimetre-wide sores – Matt found himself defaulting to that wry, understated three-word response. After four years of repetition and rattling around his head, those words are reclaimed as the title to Dinosaur Pile-Up’s defiant fifth album: 12 songs to draw a line under a half-decade of sickness and struggle, a distillation of his agonising uncertainty and self-analysis. “People need clarity about what happened,” Matt explains. “It’s been cathartic to lay it all out.”
Struggle. Vulnerability. Pain. Resilience. Love. It’s been a hell of a journey. In many ways, brilliant, shapeshifting opener – and lead single – ‘Bout To Lose It begins at the end, dropping us into the shoes of a frontman chomping at the bit to get back to business but low on confidence, unsure if fans still give a damn after so much time away: ‘I guess I’m back on the edge / Maybe I never left! / Would have been nice if you cared / But what did I expect?!’
He needn’t worry. Bursting with attitude, I’ve Felt Better’s hook-laden title-track is both confirmation that DPU haven’t lost a step and subtle expansion of the broader themes of strength in the face of adversity, transforming from lament for lost momentum to damning critique of a pop-cultural landscape gone mad. Sick Of Being Down is a grungy, mesmeric treatise on the exhaustion of balancing mental health that takes us farther back to Matt’s lowest point, and finds empowerment in how he made it out. It’s barnstorming highlight My Way that fully reignites the swagger of 2019 smash single Back Foot, though, with a hip hop-inflected ode to staying true to oneself and staying angry at a twisted modern music industry that criminally underpays its creatives.
Ten years of chasing opportunity and betting big on every chance had built Dinosaur Pile-Up into one of the most beloved alt. rock bands in the UK.
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75 Argyle Street, CH41 6AB Birkenhead, United Kingdom, 73 Argyle Street, Birkenhead, CH41 6AB, United Kingdom
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