More about: We Are Scientists

We Are Scientists are back - with their fifth album dropping this Spring, before a UK tour and headlining Live At Leeds Festival. From 'The Great Escape' and 'Nobody Move' to 'Return The Favour' and 'Dumb Luck' via 'After Hours', they've spent the last decade proving that they know their way around the tune. 

So much so, that we asked frontman Keith Murray to get academic and review this week's biggest new tracks - featuring Charli XCX, FKA Twigs, PVRIS, Massive Attack, Frightened Rabbit, All Saints, All Tvvins and Richard Ashcroft (kinda)...

PVRIS - 'You And I'
"I'm okay with this one: it's lukewarm, I guess. The singer's got a good pop-music voice - it's powerful but anonymous, a little gritty but without any hard edges - and the song is a serviceable banger. It stacks up decently against a non-single track by a Katy Perry and Sia without actually doing much to differentiate itself from those radio acts. If you ask me (which, I suppose, Gigwise did), the chorus seems a tad bombastic, musically, for a song whose message seems to be "We're slightly estranged at the moment but I'm pretty sure it'll iron itself out on its own, in good time," but I guess that overwrought delivery is what aiming for chart performance demands. Also, though, I'm not sure that we need another band with an inappropriate "V" used in the spelling of their name."

Massive Attack feat. Young Fathers - 'Voodoo In The Blood'
"I'm way down with this one. It's pretty classic Massive Attack - cool samples, great sounds - but a little more ominous, a little spookier than I normally associate with these guys. I can't tell whether I hope the sounds that feature in the video - Rosamund Pike laughing like a gibbon, the squish of her eye being pierced by a spike from a floating orb(?!), the crunch of her head against subway tile - are actually in the song itself, or if they're diegetic. Like, will those sounds - whirring alien ball, lazer beam hums - be one the album?! Either way, it's weird, and I'm into it."

Charli XCX - 'Vroom Vroom'
"Yep. Give me this. Charli is maybe my favorite pop writer/performer of the moment, mixing, as she does, radio-friendly hooks and production value with cool, crucial idiosyncrasy. Nobody else with chart topping hits seems willing to knock out weirdo ditties like this one. The constituent parts all seem sort of cobbled together in a Frankensteinian way, but instead of killing kids and stealing pies or whatever the hell Frankenstein's monster does, this beast kicks ass and does The Worm on the dancefloor."

Frightened Rabbit - 'Death Dream'
"This one a bit of a puzzler. I'm a big fan of Frightened Rabbit, and always have been - We Are Scientists lent the band our gear for their first ever NYC show, which was played to about 20 people in the basement of a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn, God knows how many years ago. They've made much of the fact that their new album is produced by one of the guys from the National, a band whose widespread acclaim has always totally baffled me. My big fear is that the National dude will, as a (presumably) responsible producer, have smeared his National slime all over the music, and this song is doing nothing to quell that concern.

"It just kinda sounds like a National song sung by Scott, and encompasses a lot of my usual gripes against that band - it's kinda aimless, plodding, interested in achieving a mixture of solipsistic thrall and emotional monochrome. Scott's always been a great lyricist, though, and his voice is a good luck charm, so it's already better than the National. This song seems like it's just a teaser release for the record, anyway - an aperitif of a track. I'm assuming the album's big guns will come out later on. In any case, people love the National, so Frightened Rabbit aren't necessarily doing themselves a commercial disservice, here. I hope they make that National money."

Richard Ashcroft - 'This Is How It Feels'
"The video for this song was blocked on YouTube in the USA at time of press, but it's Richard Ashcroft. Of course it's got to be pretty good."

FKA Twigs - 'Good To Love'
"This is a nice little airy number, and FKA Twigs has got a hell of a voice. This seems like a melody that a lot of her contemporaries would deliver without half of the character that she nails without overpowering the pretty understated production. Well, it *sounds* understated, but there's tons of cool crap happening all over - synth burbles, low-as-hell one-off bass drops, that weird vocal-formant thing that's having a moment in the world of music production, right now. This one is my favorite of the bunch."

All Saints - 'One Strike'
"This is perfectly fine, despite it sort of sounding like a half-time "Macarena." It seems a little "pop by numbers," which I don't necessarily oppose. I'm a sucker for nice, deeply-layered vocal harmonies, so that perked my ears up when it popped up, and they've all got voices that land somewhere on the spectrum between pleasant-to-great, which is nice. Otherwise, the production is good and crisp, but I guess most people want more out of a song that to recognize that it was professionally recorded. Or do they? I guess I really don't know, for sure."

All Tvvins - 'Unbelievable'
"Are you kidding? ANOTHER inappropriate use of the letter V in the spelling of a band name? Is the problem that all of these musicians are so young that they don't remember a time before people inserted Vs in the place of almost every other letter? Is that simply how they think these words are spelled? Will next year's update of my iPhone's spell-check convert random characters into Vs, so kids can read it? Is thvs how lvngvage vvill vvork in the fvtvre? Well, that sucks.

"Now I don't even remember how the song went."

Chase & Status feat. Slaves - 'Control'
"Every time I hear about Chase & Status, I always think that they're going to be a country music duo? Doesn't their name sound like that? "The Western Stylings of Jesse Chase and Wayland Status?" Is it just me?

"Anyway, this song seems like a really dumb, totally reductive, modernized Rage Against the Machine track, but I have to admit that I'm really into it. I laugh (in a good way) every time it flips into that techno beat, which sounds like the kind of thing the humans in the Matrix would dance to at their subterranean Morlock nightclub. The lyrics probably *sound* more meaningful than they actually are, but then they start playing that goofy metal guitar riff, and I totally don't care anymore. This is super fun."

We Are Scientists will be in the UK to headline Live At Leeds festival and tour in support of their forthcoming album release in April, full dates and tickets below. Tickets are on sale from 9am on Friday 26 February. For tickets and more information, visit here. 

April 25 - Nottingham, UK Rescue Rooms
April 26 - Newcastle, UK - Riverside
April 27 - Birmingham, UK - Library
April 29 - Leicester, UK - Handmade Festival
April 30 - Leeds, UK - Live at Leeds Festival
May 1 - Glasgow, UK - Stag & Dagger Fest
May 3 - Manchester, UK - Academy 2
May 4 - London, UK - Koko
May 5 - Brighton, UK - Concorde 2

More about: We Are Scientists