- By Fred Spanner
Sports Team: Boys These Days ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Boys These Days is a wild ride straight into the glittery gutter of excess and millennial meltdown.
Forget the scrappy guitar squall of their debut. Think sax solos, synths that scream Miami Vice, and frontman Alex Rice doing his best Bryan Ferry in a charity shop trench coat. It’s weird. It’s bold. It’s bloody brilliant.
Take I’m In Love (Subaru); a soaring, sax-fuelled love letter to… a Japanese car. It's part Springsteen sincerity, part Top Gear fever dream, and all tongue-in-cheek brilliance. It shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does.
The rest of the record dives headfirst into the anxieties of modern bloke-dom. Head to Space takes the piss out of billionaire rocket men, while the title track skewers every vape-sucking, podcast-binging lad trying to find his place in a world that keeps moving the goalposts.
There’s proper heart here that’s born from late-night existential crises, internet doomscrolling, and even getting mugged at gunpoint in San Fran.
It’s fun, clever, and totally barmy. Just what we’d expect.
Rating: 4 out of 5 Subarus.
