Just as their sometime running mates Los Campesinos! did last year, Johnny Foreigner have somehow found wriggle room in a packed output schedule to take stock, work out where to go from their body of work to date and compact that knowledge into an album that takes maybe a trifle too long (17 tracks!) but so forcefully makes its individual point that it feels like a natural bringing together of everything they do best at its most heartfelt and personally meaningful. Perhaps more so here, as everything they write about seems directly drawn from the same lives as you, whether that be head spinning on the sticky floor of some gig dive or watching the girl slip out the door, an absolute, intense capsule of who and what they've got. They've absolutely got their eyes on the prize, the justly routed chaos theory musical palette of right hand only arpeggios, frantic drumming around the machine and Alexei and Kelly shouting across each other lampshaded by moments that refer back to the lost debut album's weird Americana and the electronically underpinned horizons they've tampered with before. It's all in Alexei's broken sounding chorus of 200x: "I'm not done with this, I'm not giving in, I'm not giving up on you, we just got older". One day, perhaps now, we might be defeated; until then we have belief in the moment.
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