Internet Forever - Internet Forever

Well hey there, Internet Forever! It’s been a while. The London three-piece released two singles in late 2009, ‘Cover The Walls’ and ‘Break Bones’, which were nice little lo-fi nuggets of indie pop. They’ve taken their time crafting their first full-length, and it was clearly time well spent.

If those initial releases, with their low production values, heavy distortion and bedroom-demo feel, were the primordial ooze, then Internet Forever (the album) is the fully-evolved creature, a glittering example of intelligent design, something which has perfectly adapted itself to today’s music world.

That is to say, it’s a really really really good album.

The trio have, effectively, provided a blueprint of what indie pop should be in our nameless, futuristic decade. And at the same time, they’ve laid down an album which is unlikely to be surpassed. The music is full and lush, Dreamtrak and James Rutledge’s production like a modern-day wall-of-sound, incorporating crunching drums, brass sections, handclaps (where appropriate, and never ad nauesum), synthesisers, stylophones, and frontwoman Laura Wolf’s bewitching tones.

They cheerfully race through a whistle-stop tour of indie’s recent genre favourites, improving on each of them. ‘I Don’t Care’ has surf guitars and hum-worthy melodies which would The Drums would kill, ‘White Light Collision Course’ very nearly out-Summer Camps Summer Camp, and ‘3M’ is shoegaze writ relevant.

We’ve not even mentioned their lyrics, truly original as they are. ‘Break Bones’ is a fanastic anti-love song (‘I could throw sticks/I could throw stones/We could hurt each other’), ‘White Light Collision Course’ provides a whole new take on post-break-up angst (‘If I could tie you to the train tracks/I wouldn’t cos you’d die/With your heart intact’), and ‘3D’ speaks candidly about online interactions without sounding N-Dubz levels of cringey (‘Refreshed your page a hundred times/To see if you’d updated/Then when I looked at what you wrote on that message board/And everything you said I hated’).

In taking themselves out of the bedroom and into the studio Internet Forever have crafted a perfect pop record which sounds bright as it does clean, crisp and sharp, without losing any of the rougher edges they had on their previous raucuous and crackly releases. A well-realised delight.