Run as hard as you might, the good times will catch up with you. If the party kids, gamblers and libertines that raged through the dive-bar Springsteen anthems of The Hold Steady’s breakthrough album Boys And Girls In America in 2006 showed early signs of addiction and psychological issues, 15 years on they’re full-blown fuck-ups.
Open Door Policy, THS’s eighth record, is a litany of drug addicts, cheats, deadbeats and the mentally demolished.
Even the band themselves, attempting to merge the rejuvenated elation of 2019’s Thrashing Thru The Passion with the more serious records that preceded it, sound like they’re grabbing at big choruses like an alcoholic scrabbling for a bedside breakfast whisky.
But on The Feelers, the motoric Spices and Me & Magdalena, Craig Finn’s sneered diatribe about a manipulative rock junkie, they nonetheless stumble across a rich, National-like lustre of dark grooves and opiated euphoria.
And even this broken, they can still party: Family Farm, a jubilant mariachi rock blast (complete with flagrant steal from Weezer’s Surf Wax America) even manages to find the upside in being sectioned.
