The Hull band trade frantic post-punk for slide guitars, disco beats, and jangle pop—leaving listeners to piece together a record shaped by a coast-to-coast journey.
LIFE return with their fourth album, “Abstract / Natural”, out now via EMI North. A decade after the band’s breakthrough with manic, suited-up post-punk, this record largely leaves that sound behind. The title itself nods to the project’s origin: frontman Mez Sanders-Green walked across the north of England, coast to coast and back to Hull, and the album maps that journey’s emotional and sonic range.
The tracks lurch between styles. “Mermaid Feet” pairs a glum croon with slide guitars, “1” rides an Interpol-like jangle, and “Turning In” locks into an electronic disco beat. When sprechtgesang surfaces on “The Dollywagon” and “Drinking Games”, it no longer carries the urgency of 2018’s rage. A review in DIY describes the results as rudderless—“a familiarity that lies not in the band’s catalogue, but in well-trodden sound paths”—and notes that without the journey’s narrative frame, the stylistic leaps feel confusing rather than exploratory.
The album arrives as a deliberate sidestep from the post-punk revival that once defined the band. Yet in trading their signature edge for borrowed textures, LIFE risk sounding less like themselves and more like an inventory of early-2000s tropes. Context, it seems, is everything.
LIFE will tour the UK this month, with stops in Newcastle, Southampton, and Leeds.
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ROMBO Editorial Staff
The collective voice behind ROMBO Magazine’s news, reviews, features, and cultural coverage.
