The Sunshine Underground - Nobody’s Coming To Save You

You get the sense that this time around, it really is a case of sink or swim for The Sunshine Underground. We have seen cases in recent years of bands taking far too little time with their second album (hello, The Pigeon Detectives), or even their third (Kaiser Chiefs, guilty as charged). However, when you take nearly four years to produce a follow-up, it basically has to be good, or you’re finished. In fairness, though, fans have been drip-fed new material over the last two years: demos (none of which were being considered for their follow-up), brand new songs, and, in April of last year, half of the new record, which was eventually titled ‘Nobody’s Coming to Save You’.

Thankfully, the Leeds-based quartet’s second record is well capable of standing up to their (quite frankly brilliant) 2006 debut, ‘Raise the Alarm’. Suitably impressive opener and pseudo-title track ‘Coming to Save You’ announced their return to the circuit in November (as the lead track of the EP of the same name), and serves much the same purpose on the album: to shout “We’re back!” to anyone who will listen. Propelled by Matthew Gwilt’s assertive drumming, and Craig Wellington and Stuart Jones’ crunching guitar riffs, it shows that the long gestation period’s produced marvellous results for the band.

Forthcoming single ‘We’ve Always Been Your Friends’, meanwhile, shifts the focus to Daley Smith’s bass, in a song that relies heavily on the TSU rhythm section. Wellington’s lyrics are as sharp as ever, too: ‘I know your hands are tied, but are you gonna do the right thing?’ Things have also improved in the chorus department; ‘Nobody’s Coming to Save You’ features, oh, about ten great ones. That’s the entire album by the way. The Sunshine Underground have never lacked much in immediacy, but the new record seems to be even more instant than ‘Raise the Alarm’.

The album is mainly made up of up-tempo tracks. However, when the band when to take things a little slower, they do so equally well: ‘Any Minute Now’ proves to be one of the album’s highlights; a genuinely affecting song that builds over four minutes to a soaring climax, and a tremolo guitar solo written to tug at the heartstrings.

There are moments of sheer euphoria here as well. Anyone looking for the rush that a song like ‘Borders’ - arguably their best work to date - brought with it, should absolutely love ‘Here It Comes’. Sky-scraping drums and driving bass introduce ‘Nobody’s Coming to Save You’’s standout (which is also surely a candidate for the single treatment; there is massive potential here). ‘Here it comes/And I’ll be ready for it all’. Let’s hope The Sunshine Underground are right, because here is an album that could explode if enough people latch onto it. It has an absolute ton of accessibility, and works very well indeed as an album.

It’s rather fortunate, then, that it looks like the album’s title won’t prove prophetic - not looking at anyone in particular, Good Shoes. This was well worth the wait, and displays a band that are so much more than a flash in the pan. They were lumped in with the lad-rock and nu-rave scenes around the time of ‘Raise the Alarm’’s release, but the group fit in with neither. They seem to be perfectly content with just sounding like themselves.