Is there any other music act on planet Earth quite like Confidence Man? Part rave, part Eurovison, all party, the delightfully odd, high camp Aussie quartet find themselves riding high off the back of a summer that saw them bewitch Glastonbury's Other Stage with one of the most ludicrous and chaotically entertaining sets of the weekend. Now, it's time to deliver the goods; Grace 'Janet Planet' Stephenson, Aidan 'Sugar Bones' Moore and their accomplises have deservedly earned themselves a reputation as one of the best live bands in music right now, but their albums thus far have been a bit of a mixed bag, undoubtedly carried by a sprinkling of stand-out, dance floor-baiting bangers.
That all changes with 3AM (LA LA LA): across forty-seven, po-faced, shape-throwing minutes, Confidence Man haven't just tripled their hit rate, but crafted one of 2024's most relentlessly entertaining, essential dance albums, a neon-flecked, messy, makeup-smeared stumble through 90s and 00s club culture that doesn't relent until it's ready to kick you out, blurry-eyed, back into the morning.
Confidence Man haven't exactly been shy with wearing their influences on their sleeves, and they can be counted in abundance here: opener WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU'LL FIND shamelessly borrows that Depeche Mode motif; SO WHAT conjures mid-career Calvin Harris if he'd decided to stick to the warehouse circuit; SICKO's horny, industrialised stomp sounds like Trent Reznor and George Michael wrote a song together in the back room of a grotty nightclub at 4am; SO TRU is such a pure, reverent nod to 2000s UK garage that Craig David must be wondering where his feature went.
House, trance, techno, acid rave, drum 'n' bass...it's all giddily smashed together in the most propulsive and reckless way possible, anchored by Janet Planet and Sugar Bones' pouty charisma and scatty, scrawled-on-a-napkin-with-lipstick lyrics. They wouldn't get away with it all if it wasn't all pulled off so effortlessly, so joyously, so trashily. But they have pulled it off. 3AM (LA LA LA) is an instant classic.
