Remarkably, this is the Wombats’ 20th year together, and thanks to prolific touring and streaming they’ve never been bigger. The British trio have gone viral on TikTok with archive track Greek Tragedy, and are booking shows from 200 to 20,000 capacity to promote this fifth album. Like Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life (2018), Fix Yourself, Not the World sticks to the chummy indie playlist pop the band are so good at. Earnest, lovestruck singer Murph (Matthew Murphy) is front and centre of a shiny stew of easily digestible influences. Everything sounds vaguely like something else, without directly plagiarising anyone, although I thought “U2 at the club” more often than I wanted to.
As the song titles warn, the general mood is perky self-help by way of repurposed cliches such as Work Is Easy, Life Is Hard, or stalker anthem If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You. The best tracks were released last year: Ready for the High is a deliciously weird cut-and-shut, and Method to the Madness has a lovely collapsed feeling. Mostly the album settles for sprightly mediocrity, and is often quite pleasurable, if you define pleasure as the absence of pain.
