Album Review: Courting - 'Lust For Life'
Liverpool up-and-comers release third "Lust for Life..." in a sprawling collage of indie, post-rock and hyper-pop destined to hit you in the face and leave.
Courting have been an experimental tour-de-force since coming out of the underground a few years back. Ever since Famous from 2022's Guitar Music - not to mention blaring beat Popshop! on Grand National EP in 2021 (million listens *cough cough*) became their number one, the band have made it their mission to further push the boundaries that extra inch or two upon every new sprawling project. Lust for Life... is no different. Better yet, it's at their most daring. Finely bordering between fantastic craft and losing the plot entirely, their third is an entourage of bending indie anthems into what manner they find most fitting.
It's this fearlessness in young bands that have broadened the scope of what can be. While their second album, New Last Name, leaned into the idea of a theatrical narrative teetering on the wonderfully absurd, this time, Courting wanted a more direct search-and-destroy ploy for their third. Admitting an ounce of overthinking was entering the writing confines, frontman Murphy O'Neill wanted an album for what it is - "something immediate" with no excess involved at all. There's frenetic energy here, amongst dance-punk grooves and anthemic indie floor-fillers that make up all eight tracks. It can be argued that the project deserves more tracks so it's ideas are flexed and fleshed-out to their full extent. But as frontman suggests, perhaps that is the point. Describing it as a "direct and succinct" in ultimately invading any free space it occupies, Frontman Sean Murphy-O’Neill denotes that it's main goal is to "hit everyone in the face and leave."
But while the record does harbour more straightforward conventional layouts to the world of indie, it still tracks like a collage with each of the eight songs acting like temporal anecdotes into each of the four members' inspirations.
In between the indie easy-peels of Pause at You and After You, comes the hyper-pop infiltrator of Stealth Rollback which if anything, is questioned as to its whereabouts here on a record seemingly straight-edged - but its bizarre pop experimentation here is all the more welcomed. Elsewhere, we have pop-inducer Eleven Sent (This Time) and tetchy Likely place for them to be making up the numbers, which ends in a fast, flurry wall of noise. Which, for the keener listeners, is mirrored against the opener as that same stark motif is jerked out.
Namcy - the final named single before album day - is a post-rock substance, not too dissimilar of Sports Team, Bilk and fellow compatriots, wrapped around an addictive guitar hook and double-trouble vocal, "Take me away from here, I'm here I'm dying. Give me a piece and let me cry. Nearest for kissing, give me somewhere to hide. French exit, Irish goodbye."
The seventh self-titled plays homage to electronics and 808s, all the while behind a backdrop of swooning trombone before it throws into a feel-good throw-down set for the slumbers of a night out.
Every track dares to feature on The Inbetweeners soundtrack; cult-classics of fast guitar chords and easy going vocals but wisps of Courting make it worth more than just that.
It's bold, brash and highly boisterous at a time for band surpassing all expectations. While it may be a more traditional make-up, the flurries of a fuzzy slap in the face make it very much a Courting record - daring to be different.
Now on a course for three albums in one EP in the span of three short years, Lust for Life is the next embarking for a band who evidently, never stop and never slow down in their music journey. “‘Lust for Life’ is such a great title,” says Murphy-O’Neill. “It’s used so often because it means so much. Ours is as much Iggy Pop as it is Lana Del Rey. Everything we do is like a collage.”
Following the bands' third release, they hit the road at Manchester for the North and Bristol for the South, aswell as Nottingham and Birmingham dates for all those in-between. The tour begins in Leeds at Belgrave on the 15th of March and finishes up in London the 9th of April at Oslo, Hackney.
Words by Alex Curle
