Kasabian - Happenings

Though much was understandably made of Serge Pizzorno’s swift promotion to frontman ahead of Kasabian’s 2022 album ‘The Alchemist’s Euphoria’, aside from the fact that the vocals had changed from one Leicester accent to another, not all that much was actually different. Their sole songwriter from day one, the creative brain that propelled the band into one of the UK’s lairiest and largest remained the same. On ‘Happenings’, however, Pizzorno has begun to audibly write for himself, and it’s with a wider, often weirder horizon that he approaches the band’s eighth. Of course, there are absolutely monstrous bangers of the sort that Kasabian have become titans of over the past two decades; it’s hard to think of another guitar band who can wrangle sheer hedonism in the way that ‘Call’ – a classic Kasabs offering – does when it drops. 

But across the rest of the album’s spectrum, the rest of ‘Happenings’ is rarely predictable. Highlight ‘Hell Of It’ goes from twitchy hip hop beats into a dubby breakdown, whereas ‘How Far Will You Go’ arrives as a relentless, sub-two-minute punk onslaught. ‘Passengers’ starts sparse before turning into what we’ll describe as ‘Imagine Dragons but not shit’, while the balearic sunshine vibes of ‘Coming Back To Me Good’ mark genuinely new terrain for the group. There are a couple of misses, particularly ‘G.O.A.T’’s obvious attempt at a sports montage soundtrack, but largely ‘Happenings’ is full of genuinely interesting choices. Free to indulge all the multitudes of his tastes, Pizzorno is managing, against many odds, to keep Kasabian moving forward.