Relentless

Relentless is a masterly achievement, tasting of truth.

A balance of material, performance, and production mirrors the bandleader’s emotional equanimity in such sublime fashion, Relentless is as close to perfect as long-player out this year.

A record that can sit proudly at the top table of The Pretenders’ work to date.

Hynde sounds like she’s never left her glory days, and to assume anything less would be a disservice. Her voice is rich with age, thick with wisdom, perfect for listlessly reminiscing about smoky hotel rooms and other rockstar cliches of “her prime”.

A Love and Let the Sun Come In recall the jangle of their early-80s imperial phase. The ballads are equally well executed, most notably the closing I Think About You Daily, with Jonny Greenwood’s hypnotic string arrangement imbuing Hynde’s uncharacteristically swagger-free vocals with a powerful sense of regret and vulnerability.

It takes a few listens, but once it swims into focus it's another knockout. [Oct 2023, p.82]

There may be nothing to touch Pretenders classics like Brass In Pocket or Don’t Get Me Wrong, but Relentless is an appropriately named album – the sound of a band constantly moving forward and refusing to submit to the dying of the light.

At this point, a Pretenders album is whatever she says it is and Relentless is a good one.

Surely Relentless is how Chrissie Hynde always wanted the Pretenders to sound. [Oct 2023, p.79]

She has crooned before, but the freight of intimate emotion here, letting low notes waver within the ferally alive arrangement, is masterful. Ending an album of looking back, this is the new prime of Chrissie Hynde. [Oct 2023, p.22]

Even on slower material, like the teary closing six-minute ballad “I Think About You Daily” featuring stressed, experimental strings arranged by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, Hynde injects so much riveting emotion that few will be disappointed.