Some bands are so concerned with image and style that they come at the expense of the music. Although Blossoms have always been a sartorially sharp group, the Stockport band’s fifth album sees them adopt a more frivolous approach to songwriting. That Gary takes its title from a news report about a 2.5m-tall fibreglass gorilla stolen from a garden centre in Scotland tells you all you need to know. These are not songs to stroke your chin to.
Instead, having plumbed the depths of more serious fare on their last album, Ribbon Around the Bomb, in 2022, the Tom Ogden-led band are leaning into lightheartedness. After all, this is the group that charmed Glastonbury audiences in 2023 by joining forces with Rick Astley for a surprise set of Smiths covers (two acts, incidentally, who are namechecked on the track Mothers).
Part of the indie-poppers’ newfound levity, according to Ogden, was down to their songwriting sessions with the Irish artist CMAT, who altered the band’s viewpoint, cowriting and providing backing vocals on the fashion-themed, Blondie-influenced I Like Your Look and also contributing to the album’s galloping, string-aided closer, Why Do I Give You the Worst of Me?
This is undoubtedly Blossoms’ party album. Songs such as What Can I Say After I’m Sorry and Nightclub (a tongue-in-cheek track about tactics to skip the queue and charm the doorman at a club) embrace a 1970s disco-pop strut; the title track is distinctly Kinks-like in parts, while the opener, Big Star, owes a debt to noughties acts such as The Coral and The Zutons. (Incidentally, James Skelly of the former has produced every Blossoms album, including this one.)
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A smattering of earnestness is threaded through the tracklist, too. Mothers is an ode to friendship, based on the fact that Ogden and drummer Joe Donovan’s mums were friends in the 1980s, and Perfect Me is a pensive tale of self-reflection. Overall, though, the order of the day is irreverence with a side of whimsy. It makes for an album admittedly lacking in depth, but profundity is often overrated in pop music.
