Happiness

Only a joyless weirdo could deny that these are fearsomely well-crafted songs, as clean-lined and immaculate as a well-cut suit.

Style and gravitas are all very well--if Hurts could also have been consistent with the substance, Happiness would have trounced its 80s counterparts and many of its contemporaries, too.

It's this capacity to write immediately affecting songs coupled with an effortless cool that will see Hurts catapulted towards stardom. The fact that the album tails off dramatically with a series of appalling ballads in the shape of The Water and Unspoken will almost certainly be overlooked in favour of the classy sounds of Wonderful Life or the glorious pulsing anthem of Better Than Love.

Happiness promises the rough edges and absurdity of one era's pop, but for the most part gives the mum-friendliness of the next. Hurts would surely be better if they committed to one or the other.

Unfortunately, the album barely reaches the most reasonable of expectations. The strength of their flawless magnum opus, 'Better Than Love', overshadows every other song on the LP.

Theo Hutchcraft and Adam Anderson prove to be a depressingly ordinary package of overblown melodies and musty lyrical cliches, expensively ribboned with choirs and orchestras. [Sep 2010, p.116]

Depending on your perspective, their invention of a genre either places Hurts into a grand tradition of pop theorists and pranksters--such as the KLF and the ZTT label in its Paul Morley–helmed heyday--or smacks of dressing up something to appear more cool and interesting than it actually is.