Nature Always Wins

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When you lose an integral part of any machine there are two potential outcomes - you find a way to make things work without, or watch as the whole thing falls apart in front of your eyes. Following the 2019 departure of keyboardist Lukas Wooller, who decided to go off in search of a life Down Under, Maximo Park have returned a case in point for reprogramming and repositioning with an eye on what's next.

With a little help from Ben H Allen, a producer whose CV includes Gnarls Barkley, Kaiser Chiefs and Erasure, they have managed to deliver something that's very much Maximo Park and yet decidedly different to what has come before. Up against 2017's hugely political album, Risk To Exist, here things are far more personal in theme and sparser, perhaps more basic in structure, but just as powerful, in subtler kind of way.