As unlikely as it may seem, the pairing of Luke Haines and Peter Buck has proven to be a fertile one. Of course, we had enough distractions in 2020 to include the meeting of a stadium-honed US guitarist with a British outsider art-rocker on our bingo cards. Yet when Buck bought one of Haines’ paintings, the connection would lead to a debut album, Beat Poetry for Survivalists (2020), and its sprawling, experimental sequel, All the Kids Are Super Bummed Out (2022). Across both records, it emerged that Buck and Haines had found harmony in an encyclopaedic musical knowledge and a shared conviction that rock’n’roll is best pursued in prolific practice.
The sense of a band caught in motion energises this marvellous third entry in their self-billed…