I may have come to the band late; after all, their first release was over a decade ago, but over the last few years, The Nearly Deads have consistently and quickly worked their way up my list of favorite bands with each successive release. So the news of a full album, the aptly titled We Are The Nearly Deads, was a pretty exciting prospect, I can tell you.
You see, the clever thing about The Nearly Deads, something showcased perfectly on this album, is that they understand how to create, control, and surf collision points. Collision points such as where the infectiousness of pop runs head-long into the bombast of classic rock, where punk attitude meets alt-rock swagger. Where muscle is subsumed by melody, power by poise, grind by groove. The Nearly Deads exist at the sweetest of sweet spots of a very complex Venn Diagram.
And, having instigated such musical collisions, they harness and ride out the sonic ripples to fantastic ends. Songs like “Suffocate” exist firmly between pop and a hard place, staccato pulses and raucous riffs wrecked and reformed into addictive pop-aware sounds. “Wonderland” is anthemic to the point of euphoria, and “Believer” sees them reinvent the power ballad for the modern age without the cliche.
“Relentless” re-imagines pop-punk jauntiness and buries it under metal tones and intense rock riffing, and things round off with “Faith”, a boundless bundle of incendiary riffs and vocal crescendoes. Their songs might gather and garner references and mechanisms from all over the musical landscape, but the one thing that they never embrace is compromise. In lesser hands such machinations would result in a watering down of ideas. Here, things just get more and more fired up!
On this new album The Nearly Deads don’t disappoint, but then again, they never have. Theirs is the ability to understand what makes any number of genres work and, in turn, bring those various sonic elements together to build a unique engine to drive their intense yet infectious, energetic, and addictive songs.
You might have heard something like them before, but this is the first time you have heard it done this brilliantly!
Pre-orders begin on 16th June
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