Single Review: Black Futures - 'Riches'

You know when people tell you that guitar music is dead and you listen to the radio, hear The 1975, Catfish and the Bottlemen and The Hunna and succumb to a depressing defeat?

NEVER FEAR!

Guitar music is fucking awesome. Absolutely not dead. I mean, no ones gonna fucking playlist this tune on Radio 1. But when it’s played with this much aggression, passion and ingenuity, you don’t fucking care. Rock’n’roll isn’t meant to be played on the fucking radio, its meant to explode inside any individual soul it sees fit to crawl inside. And Black Futures could be that filthy, infectious, black future.

In way of lyrics, this song isn’t going to win any Nobel Prizes. But the indominatble slur of “our love is overrated” in the chorus could inspire a degree of anarchy in the most subdued of listener. The song marches with a DFA1979 style swagger before breaking into a massive QOTSA style riff- obviously with Trent Reznor on the beats instead of Dave Grohl. And then the best thing that ever happens in any song ever happens, which I won’t ruin for everyone because you need to fucking listen to it. But trust me, it’s awesome. And it comes out of fucking nowhere. This is the moment when the crowd would open and when the song launches back in after a television presenter announces to “get rich”, the crowd fly into each other. And it’s bigger and badder and faster than anything that happens in the first half of the song. The devil is screaming something in grunge at you and you feel more liberated than throwing a nail bomb into the houses of parliament. Black Futures are going to soundtrack your darkest pleasures, the best sex of your life, the most intense exercise sessions of your life and, in this uncertain future, it’s the best thing to stick on loud on this inevitable rollercoaster ride to hell that we’ve all been forced to go on. Let them into your soul.

Words by James Kitchen