Album Review Peach Pit - From 2 To 3

Peach Pit remain a slightly enigmatic proposition. The Vancouver outfit saw their eponymous debut single go viral in 2016, with a YouTube view count well into the tens of millions, despite the fact that its breezy indie rock hardly fit the template for what tends to constitute a viral hit. Uneven first album, ‘Being So Normal’, swiftly followed, and while follow-up full-length, ‘You and Your Friends’, fell bigger and bolder, you can’t help but shake the sense that they’ve never quite managed to capture the same lightning in a bottle as they did with that track, which felt like the band in microcosm in just under five minutes. Now, they return with a third album, ‘From 2 to 3’, the title of which is telling. According to frontman Neil Smith, the record was written in the small hours, in a hushed manner so as not to wake the neighbours. While we return to regular volume for the recordings themselves, these initial moves seem to have paid dividends; with the gradual clockwise turning of the dial, these songs come to life in terms of warmth and richness, imbuing tracks like opener ‘Up Granville’ and the pretty ‘Last Days of Lonesome’ with the kind of character often missing from the last two albums.