When Confidence Man first appeared in 2018 with their debut ‘Music For Assured Folks’, they felt like an in-joke everybody might take part with: all dayglo electroclash, deadpan lyrics and enjoyably wonky reside reveals that includes homespun choreography. Their second album, 2022’s ‘TILT’, noticed frontwoman Janet Planet and her shirt-averse foil Sugar Bones enterprise additional into dance music. Now, within the slipstream of latest club-facing collabs with the likes of Daniel Avery and DJ Seinfeld, plus a prestigious Cloth Presents combine, their euphoric third album all the time has one swivel-eye on the afterparty.
‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ is each a reference to the nocturnal hour at which they’d write music whereas wasted and a nod to The KLF’s basic banger ‘3 a.m. Everlasting’. Cannibalising the acid home, trance and breakbeat sounds of the ‘90s, ConMan couldn’t evoke a bootleg rave from that interval extra lovingly with out being arrested below the 1994 Prison Justice Act. Sonic touchstones right here embrace Orbital, Underworld and The Prodigy. You possibly can nearly odor the Vicks VapoRub wafting from the audio system throughout the turbocharged ‘Actual Transfer Contact’, which options reggae MC and Gorillaz collaborator Sweetie Irie.
Impressed by their relocation from Brisbane to Dalston and subsequent exploration of London nightlife, they offer their new hometown a shout-out on opening observe ‘Who Is aware of What You’ll Discover?’. Over French Contact-style filter home, Planet sings “Meet me on the nook of Mare Road and Ridley Street”, just like the world’s worst sat-nav, since this intersection doesn’t really exist.
Nonetheless, it provides to ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’’s blurry, oblivion-chasing spirit – which is so relentlessly in thrall to using the crest of hedonism that it makes Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ summer time appear to be Dry January. Marrying bubblegum hooks to acid home, the maximalist ‘Management’ feels like The Prodigy’s Keith Flint doing a key on the Vengabus, whereas the precisely titled ‘Breakbeat’ accommodates the lyric “Obtained a capsule in my pocket and I’m not going to drop it till I hear the breakbeat” and boasts a blissed-out Balearic breakdown.
The grinding ‘Sicko’, in the meantime, sounds prefer it might have been dropped as a Paul Oakenfold remix at The Haçienda, with Bones’ phantasmagorical vocals channelling the woozy claustrophobia of overindulgence. Elsewhere, Planet unleashes her internal Candi Staton-style home diva on the transcendent ‘’Flawed Concept’, whereas ‘So Tru’ revisits turn-of-the-millennium UK 2-step.
Crucially, it’s a testomony to the songwriting smarts of Confidence Man – whose lineup is accomplished by veiled band members Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie – that ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ by no means feels like an train in pastiche. Truly, it completely chimes with this post-‘Brat’ period of reckless abandonment recession pop. Already essentially the most enjoyable reside band round, you all the time really feel that Confidence Man are on the precipice of turning into the sort of correct crossover pop stars that Bowen Yang would possibly impersonate on Saturday Night time Stay. ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’, their most assured assortment but, proves they positively have the tunes to match their outsized personas.
Particulars
- Launch date: October 18, 2024
- Report label: Chaos/Polydor
