Boy King

More so than ever on the new Boy King, Wild Beasts seem especially comfortable and confident with their wayward electro. Which only shows in the added coats of glitz.

Boy King is a thrilling and evocative step forward for a band who seem to continue evolving at a remarkable rate.

Boy King lends further weight to the view that Wild Beasts are one of the best bands operating in Britain today, and it’s not shy in doing so.

Boy King is intrusive, abrasive and in-your-face--but that’s no criticism: one can imagine lads properly belting out ‘Big Cat’ and ‘Alpha Female’ at live shows.

Their most rowdy and rambunctious album yet.

This is an album filled with earworms, with hooklines and stray phrases that burrow deep into your consciousness. [Sep 2016, p.72]

Reinvention and liberation have brought the Beasts’ best yet.

The result may be the band’s best album yet, one on which they come closer than ever.

Wild Beasts have shed a lot of excess, offering a stripped-back amalgamation of analogue Eighties synths, snappy machine rhythms and industrial rock guitar buzz, coloured with great swathes of harmonic panache, that is lean and mean enough to pass for modern pop. This newfound purpose is the real revelation of Wild Beasts’ strongest album to date.

So alongside the creeping softness of ‘Dreamliner’--which is full of Alt-J-worthy waves of sensual electronica--we get the biggest noises the band have made to date.

Wild Beasts' stripped down songs have developed incrementally into a more electronic direction and these finely detailed arrangements feature twitchy kit and synthetic drums, sequencers, abstract sonics, '80s keyboard stabs and guitars occasionally let off the leash. [Sep 2016, p.95]

Boy King is an album that exudes confidence to try new things, to experiment, to pull things apart and pull them back together again. [Sep 2016, p.100]

A fifth album u-turn that few could pull off, Boy King is the sound of a band reborn. The core elements are all still there--that falsetto-baritone play-off between vocalists Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming as prominent as ever--but they’re glitched-up and garbled.

Certainly a contender for the most electronic of their canon, Boy King is perhaps also their most compact and claustrophobic release since 2011’s Smother.

Critically, this may not move many needles. But to casual listeners, Wild Beasts are on a mission to refine their own definition. This is must-witness music at its very finest.

Rock-hard and sloppy in equal measure, Boy King is a creature of base instinct from a band of high intellect more used to drawing their songs from their frontal lobes than their testes (even if their lyrics often suggest otherwise).

There’s no disputing that it’s on some of the more problematic tracks that record really shines musically.

Boy King may be some of Wild Beast's most consistent and accessible music, but at a price: It comes dangerously close to predictable, something the band never would have been called before.

After the crossroads moment that was Present Tense, Boy King is undoubtedly a powerful statement of intent from a talented, ambitious group of musicians clearly keen to explore new and bold territory. Yet by making this call, they have also sacrificed some of the crucial nuances that made Wild Beasts stand out from their peers in the first place.

Some will accuse them of cynicism, and they may be right, but there is enough intriguing material which is unarguably theirs here which keeps this an inventive and enjoyable pop-rock record.