Future Ruins

The ten tracks here are less optimistic than the last album, but also less temperamental than the band's younger days. The songs feel removed from needing to fit into any overarching identity and take risks that wouldn't happen if Swervedriver was trying to reinvent themselves or re-create a time long passed.

Not only is Future Ruins a welcome addition to the Swervedriver canon. It also fully confirms their reunion was anything but a nostalgia trip.

Sixth studio album ‘Future Ruins’ is exquisite, featuring jaw-dropping songs that tap into the human condition and what it means to be alive in 2018.

Bold and ambitious, Future Ruins is deliriously difficult to place, and all the more exciting for it.

The band’s sixth album thrives in the spaces between the power chords and choruses.

Future Ruins achieves everything an admirer could ask of the reunited band's new album.

The sound is big, but his vocal is less a call to arms than a melancholic dream of better days to come.

For all the grim despondency, this is an album steeped in the acrid stench of beauty.

The second LP of their decade-long comeback is defined by the warm fuzz of Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge's guitars--like a dusty desert sirocco, creating a benign concussed daze.

The spacious, Neil Young-ian rumbling of the title track and the bulked-up power-pop of "Spiked Flower" both see co-founders Adam Franklin and Jimmy Hartridge venture beyond the template of Raise and Mezcal Head without making the faithful worry they've ditched their distortion pedals.

The band are able to carve out fun songs but often with many familiar moments to them. Though the talent is there, Swervedriver will need to take more risks to wow us in the future.

Future Ruins centres on the political climate in which it was made; Swervedriver are clearly pissed off with how things are, a theme which drips from every fibre of this body of work. It is in this overall tone that the album suffers, as there is little let up in this negativity as an all-encompassing feeling of suffocation takes hold of the listener.

Ultimately, this is yet another solid entry into Swervedriver's impressive back catalogue, but there is perhaps only so long they can keep running their sound into the ground.

In trying to make listeners confront dark times, Swervedriver has only made an album that will bore before it has the intended impact.