Album Review: the XCERTS - 'i think i want to go home now'
Calling the new record from The XCERTS a return to form would be disingenuous. The Brighton-via-Aberdeen trio have been resolutely forging their own path through music since the early 2000s, incredibly consistent yet somehow reinventing themselves with each record. They’ve taken bigger risks as time’s gone on; the pop-tinged turn on Hold On to Your Heart was a slam dunk, while 2023’s Learning How to Live and Let Go didn’t land all its punches but took some impressively big swings in its hooks-first approach. (More on that later.) That’s the thing about this band - it’s been Murray Macleod, Jordan Smith and Tom Heron against the world since 2006, and they’ve always avoided half measures, even when circumstances did their utmost to send the trio off the rails a few years ago.
Between a cancer scare (Macleod’s father), parental loss (Smith’s mother), creative frustration, romantic turmoil and a general sense of instability (much of which was percolating in the background before their last album came out), it’s a wonder they got this over the line at all. i think i want to go home now. makes their 2011 broadside Scatterbrain seem light by comparison, channeling similar feelings through a totally different sonic palette. They haven’t made a record in a room together in a while, and in that sense they return to their roots here, pushing into harder and heavier territory both musically and emotionally, a marked shift from the topics they explored since There Is Only You.
‘pretty ugly’ is a therapeutic howl of defiance that’s folded into the album narrative as a moment where Macleod takes himself to task for caring so much about what other people—in this case, the band’s fans—think. If you need reminding, ‘Gimme’ was an outlier on Learning…, full of attitude and loaded with vocoded vocals and electronic tinges, a wild swerve that attracted plenty of attention. “I’m wasting my precious breath on these people I can neither bear nor stand” he sings, and it’s not meant as a clapback, more as ‘how are you letting this get under your skin?’ It’s all a matter of perspective, and artists just sometimes have to do things for themselves. Hell, a certain amount of selfishness is what helped this album get made in the first place; you have to lock in and get it done when the thing you spent more than two decades building is on the verge of dissolution.
There’s nervous energy coursing through every song on the record, with the brief title track setting the scene, easing open the door before ‘do it to myself’ kicks it down, finding the band battling to hold things together amidst calamity and imminent collapse, unable to resist the allure of self-sabotage, ‘burning every night drunk and petrified’. ‘wow’ surveys the wreckage, starting a descent into emotional numbness that’s at odds with the forceful and determined nature of these songs, throwing up plenty of questions and offering little in the way of solutions. ‘bury you’ offers a glimpse of light, the closest the album comes to an anthemic pep talk, but the narrative never really offers a way out, highlighting the pervasive and all-consuming nature of loss and grief, a document of years defined by repeated setbacks.
Just viewing the lyric sheet, relief is hard to find on i think i want to go home now.; even the album title, spelled out in lowercase, seems defeated, yet its closing track ‘in your eyes’ offers a gargantuan payoff, building to a storm of noise. “This isn’t ‘goodbye’, this is ‘I’ll love you forever’” Macleod sings, the album’s closing moments offering somewhat of a safe haven, a feeling bolstered by a recording of Smith’s mother saying ‘I love you’ as the song fades out. It’s remarkable how these three make subject matter as deeply personal as this feel universal—the burnout, the despair, the sheer overwhelm—and catharsis bleeds from every note. Those in search of easy answers will be better served elsewhere, but if this record speaks to you, hold it close. This one’s for anyone who’s been through hell and lived to tell the tale; beautiful and devastating in equal measure. The jury’s still out on what their best album is, and a case can be made for all six, but this may just be the most important album the XCERTS have made yet.
Words by Gareth O'Malley
