The Search - Indulgence (Aenaos Records)

Music is cyclical; we all know that. About every thirty years or so, a musical generation, you can hear traces of earlier scenes and sounds working their way into the music of modern creatives. But too many people looking back for inspiration get a bit too hooked in and end up sounding less a band inspired by the past and more a tribute to it.

What I love about The Search in general, and their latest album Indulgence, in particular, is that although they certainly find helpful building blocks from earlier post-punk and new wave landscapes, they are less a celebration of those times and more the sound of those styles being updated and taken to their logical conclusion – the sound of those scenes in the modern age.

Take a song like “You Just Want Somebody To Hold,” listen again, and tell me that it doesn’t have a touch of The Mission at their most delicate, yet still the sound of understated rock in 2024. Similarly, “Pick Me Up” echoes with the likes of The Goo Goo Dolls yet is the sound of infectious indie rock for the here and now. “The Talk” also reminds me of the much overlooked Power of Dreams, (which is a good thing, a very good thing indeed,) a band which you will probably have to, and indeed absolutely must, go and look up for reference.

I guess I’m saying that The Search understands music history and its place in it. They know that there is nothing new under the sun, but that you can take those established grooves and classic moves and turn them into something brilliant and brilliantly unique, fresh, and just familiar enough for a whole new audience.

The Search may understand where music has been but is only interested in where it goes next.

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