When Friendly Fires released their debut album in 2008, the St Albans trio’s busy, brooding brand of electro-punk seemed precision-engineered for a music scene craving respite from the scratchy guitars and pointy brogues of landfill indie. By the time the band’s second, Pala, came out three years later, they were on the precipice of proper mainstream success; their dancefloor-friendly synthpop merged intricate, pulsing percussion with big, yearning choruses. Now, however, as the band return to a fractured pop landscape after a momentum-quashing eight-year break, their relationship to the zeitgeist is far less clear. Perhaps they know this: on their third album, they instead seem intent on submerging themselves in the past.
That past is the 1980s, specifically the decade’s effervescently joyful funk-and-soul-facing new wave. It’s a period the band have always drawn from, but this time they glaze their tightly woven beats with gut-punching nostalgia. With his breathily impassioned croon, frontman Ed Macfarlane now comes over like a cross between George Michael and Green Gartside. In fact, Scritti Politti’s meticulous saccharine soul echoes throughout Inflorescent, as does the era’s camp, navel-gazing melodrama – holiday epic Silhouettes resembles a gap-year Club Tropicana. There does seem to be a deliberate embrace of the uncool here – the Disclosure-produced Heaven Let Me In is reminiscent of Spiller’s Groovejet – but if anything, that just reaffirms the sense of unselfconscious cheer. It’s true that any album this laced with optimism is bound to feel slightly blinkered in the current climate – but by burying their heads in the sand, Friendly Fires prove they can be a much-needed source of release once again.
