“It’s one of those things where you find out who your friends are,” Justin Hawkins mused recently to the half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel, referencing the fan base-dividing video for recent single I Hate Myself, featuring a heavily made up Hawkins staring down the camera lens for the song’s duration.
The same take-it-or-leave-it spirit pervades Dreams On Toast. But then The Darkness have long been rock’s most Marmite band. Back in the early noughties, when the studied Stateside cool of The Strokes and the White Stripes redefined the indie-rock zeitgeist, The Darkness’s peculiarly English fusion of Queen and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band seemed about as culturally relevant as Nora Batty.
Yet their subsequent success – 2003 debut Permission To Land went quadruple platinum and earned the band three Brit Awards – vindicated their determination to do things their own way, their resolve reflected in a renaissance which has seen them claw their way back up to stadium level since their 2011 reunion.
Put it down to Justin Hawkins’s age, then (he turned 50 this month), but this strain of defiance is as prominent as ever on the band’s eighth studio album. Opener Rock And Roll Party Cowboy feels like a continuation of the breezy hair-metal of 2019’s Motorheart up until the final seconds when the singer bawls: “Fuck off!”, while a swaggering I Hate Myself is actually an ode to self-loathing, and the bad-tempered The Battle For Gadget Land delivers a Chinese burn to the chrome arm of progress, Dan Hawkins’s guitar battery as corrosive as Killer On The Loose-era Thin Lizzy. Equally, unexpected diversions into country honk (Cold Hearted Woman, Hot On My Tail) and cinematic balladry (Weekend In Rome) may also raise eyebrows among diehards.
But when the storm clouds clear, the band’s innate pop sensibilities shine as brightly as ever. The Longest Kiss is a gorgeous synthesis of 70s bubblegum pop that nods to 90s cult icons Jellyfish, while Don’t Need Sunshine is a mid-tempo banger of stadium-sized proportions. Better still is Walking Through Fire. The kind of fist-in-the-air anthem that reminds you why we fell in love with The Darkness in the first place, it even comes with a breakdown where Hawkins – channelling Vivian Stanshall – declares: ‘We never stopped making hit albums, it’s just that no one buys them any more!’
In a world of bread-and-butter rock bands, The Darkness remain the toast of the town.
