Cover Feature Playing For Keeps: The Vaccines

Of all the frontmen out there – a niche breed, prone to self-reflection at the best of times – Justin Young must rank in the upper percentiles of hyper-self-awareness. Sitting in the corner of a cafe with guitarist Freddie Cowan, compulsively unbuttoning and re-buttoning a now-customary varsity jacket as we wind down from an intense hour of conversation surrounding the build up and eventual birth of The Vaccines’ fourth album ‘Combat Sports’, the singer is fretting whether he’s made his point clearly.

“It’s difficult when you make two indie rock records and then you make one that’s more loosely like that, and then you [return to it]. It could be construed as regressive, but it doesn’t feel like that to me at all,” he stresses. “I’m still trying to figure out how to get it across, because I hate that narrative we’ve all read a million times of a band rediscovering who they are. I read enough of other people’s interviews to realise how awful it is when people talk about ‘getting back in the room and getting back to basics’. We weren’t trying to go back and make ‘What Did You Expect…’ all over again. ‘Combat Sports’ is absolutely not one of those records.”

It would, indeed, be easy to thrust this narrative onto the band. Having released a more out-of-the-box third album in 2015’s ‘English Graffiti’, lost a member (drummer Pete Robertson), gained two more (replacement Yoann Intonti and keyboardist Tim Lanham now complete the line-up alongside original bassist Arni Arnason), pushed back the ETA of their newie by a full year and then re-emerged with a record that summons the passion and energy of their 2011 sea-changing debut, it’s almost the classic story of a band “rediscovering themselves” or any other number of stock phrases that the singer vocally hates.

But, like most things associated with The Vaccines – be that music, attitude or trajectory – the story under the surface is a lot more nuanced than it may first appear. Theirs is a tale of losing sight of your identity and then evolving into its next incarnation, and of finally getting to grips with what made them so damn exciting all along. As Justin puts it, “It’s funny because the journey we’ve gone on to sound like The Vaccines has been a long and winding road.” It did, however, start off at what could easily have become a dead end.