Album Review: The Script - ‘The User’s Guide To Being Human’
The Script’s songs are built to begin intimately, often with a confession or a wound, before expanding into something communal and enormous.
They’ve spent nearly two decades perfecting the particular kind of emotional architecture that we see today. And few bands understand quite as instinctively how private heartbreak can become an arena-wide singalong. On The User’s Guide To Being Human, The Script continue to operate within that familiar territory, but with a renewed sense of purpose and a deeper understanding of what their audience has come to expect from them.
Led by the irrepressible Danny O'Donoghue, The Script return with an album that feels less like a reinvention than a reaffirmation. Following the success of Satellites and its accompanying tour, O'Donoghue found himself energised enough to begin writing almost immediately. Within a week of finishing the previous campaign, he was back in the studio working with Andrew Frampton, Steve Kipner and Jimbo Barry, collaborators whose history with The Script includes some of the band's defining songs, among them ‘Hall Of Fame’, ‘The Man Who Can't Be Moved’ and ‘Breakeven’. Recorded in Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles, the resulting album is polished, expansive and unapologetically emotional.
The current line-up, with O'Donoghue joined by Glen Power, Benjamin Sargeant and Ben Weaver, gives the record the muscle required to deliver its biggest moments. Yet the emotional centre remains O'Donoghue's voice, which has always been at its most effective when vulnerability and defiance occupy the same space.
Opening with ‘Man in the Arena’, inspired by Theodore Roosevelt's famous speech, The Script immediately establishes the album's philosophy. It is a song about perseverance, participation and refusing to stand on the sidelines of your own life. There is little ambiguity in its message, but that directness is part of the band's appeal. The Script have never been interested in emotional understatement when a full-throated declaration will do.
That approach continues with ‘The Crowd Was Singing Wonderwall’, a confident statement of intent that sounds tailor-made for the band's live audience. From its clattering drums and shimmering guitar textures, the track has the scale of a summer evening in a packed stadium. It is music constructed for vast spaces, for thousands of voices joining together, and for the inevitable sea of smartphone lights replacing the lighters of previous generations.
The production is immaculate, perhaps almost to a fault. Every harmony is carefully positioned, every drum hit engineered for maximum impact and every instrumental layer polished until it gleams. The result sounds expensive, meticulously considered and purpose-built for the arena. For some listeners, that precision may occasionally feel a little too controlled, but there is also something undeniably effective about hearing a band that knows exactly what it wants to achieve.
Elsewhere, ‘Scars Again’ taps into The Script's enduring fascination with emotional damage and resilience, while the title track, ‘The User's Guide To Being Human’, provides the album with its conceptual heart. Rather than presenting humanity as something neat or easily understood, the song embraces contradiction, vulnerability and emotional excess.
That idea flows naturally into ‘After We're Gone’ and ‘Living Our Life Without Me’, both of which explore absence and the lingering consequences of relationships. ‘I'm 100 Different People’ broadens the perspective, capturing the fractured identities that can emerge as people move through different versions of themselves. It is one of the album's more revealing ideas, particularly on a record concerned with the messy spectrum of human experience.
‘Years’ and ‘Alive’ continue that journey towards perspective and gratitude, while ‘Grow Old With Grace’ introduces one of the album's most affecting sentiments. There is maturity in its consideration of ageing, time and the desire to embrace life's imperfections rather than outrun them.
Closing with ‘One Team For Life’, The Script finish where they have always been strongest: together. It is a fitting conclusion for a band whose music has consistently blurred the line between performer and audience.
As O'Donoghue puts it, “The title is what this album is about. If you need something to remind you of the spectrum of feelings and emotions that make you feel human, this is it.”
That statement neatly captures the record's greatest strength. The User's Guide To Being Human does not attempt to provide literal instructions for navigating life. Instead, it offers a soundtrack for the confusion, heartbreak, optimism, regret, resilience and joy that come with it. The Script knows their lane, and rather than abandoning it, they drive further into it with confidence.
This is an album designed to be felt collectively, preferably with thousands of other people singing every word back at the band. For The Script, that is not a limitation. That is the point.
Words by Danielle Holian
