Dirty Hit Vinyl & CDs

Review: Jack Antonoff's Bleachers project - official stage name for him and accompanying players - made a big impact with 2014's debut single, 'I Wanna Get Better', and continued to pull in followers across three albums, offering equal parts contemporaneity and nostalgia on record(s). Inspired by alternative, light, and pop rock of the late-1980s and early-1990s, there's more than a sense of reflecting on life's great moments about the band, and their fourth LP is exemplary of this. Rousing choruses on big hitters like 'Isimo', 'I Am Right On Time', and 'Tiny Moves' invoke a sense of real togetherness, while saxophones on several songs are deliberate reminders of John Hughes movie scores, and specifically Rob Lowe's downtrodden character in St Elmo's Fire, a prototype for the perpetually adolescent adults that now dominate the millennial generation. Other moments take things down to a more focused and intimate level, 'Hey Joe' and 'Woke Up Today', for example.

Review: RECOMMENDED
There's absolutely no doubt in our mind Blue Weekend is a record Wolf Alice feel a sense of enormous personal satisfaction from. Of course time will tell if it can bag them another Top 5 position, or even a Mercury Prize nomination, but for all intents and purposes there's a real feeling of catharsis here. And it goes well beyond famously reserved singer Ellie Rowsell telling listeners she doesn't give a fuck if they like her.

The band's latest punches, bangs and has absolutely no time for dishonestly. In many ways, this is where they are fully realising influences that have always been present - grunge, punk, some of that 1990s British indie-garage-with-bite crossover stuff. But it's also a record that sees them realising just where they've got to, and now reaching for a louder and more prominent position on the main stage.