That’s how Boy King comes across on the first few listens, as if it’s squaring up to us, strutting, all testosterone and violent, eyeballing virility.
More so than ever on the new Boy King, Wild Beasts seem especially comfortable and confident with their wayward electro. Which only shows in the added coats of glitz.
Boy King is a thrilling and evocative step forward for a band who seem to continue evolving at a remarkable rate.
It’s a brilliantly soft evolution of the rich creativity that made ‘Present Tense’ run so deep, and a fresh take on the electricity, funk oddities, lovelorn supplication and familiarly bold intent that make ‘Boy King’ an album that only Wild Beasts could have made.
On their fifth album, they have decided to strip away all the book learning and play dumb. Of course, this being Wild Beasts, “playing dumb” still means invoking Byron and TS Eliot, but here the lyrics are relatively blunt, more like haiku than sonnets.
Certainly a contender for the most electronic of their canon, Boy King is perhaps also their most compact and claustrophobic release since 2011’s Smother.
This time they’ve decided to house their fulsome electro-indie randiness in something of a concept album, one that picks apart the idea of masculinity, stripping it down in an attempt to reveal its hidden depths.
A fifth album u-turn that few could pull off, ‘Boy King’ is the sound of a band reborn. The core elements are all still there ... but they’re glitched-up and garbled.
Its songs churn out their most muscular grooves yet, leaving a trail of testosterone in their wake.
Critically, this may not move many needles. But to casual listeners, Wild Beasts are on a mission to refine their own definition. This is must-witness music at its very finest.
While not hitting the tremendous heights of the band's late Noughties output, it is refreshing to see the band put a halt to the glacial drift which had seemingly consumed them in the current decade.
After the crossroads moment that was Present Tense, Boy King is undoubtedly a powerful statement of intent from a talented, ambitious group of musicians clearly keen to explore new and bold territory.
Boy King is defined by its self-consciously uncensored lyrics, in which the deepest, most problematic masculine urges are bared in sexy, spare songs built around cutting synths, provocative vocal performance and in-your-face drums.
Boy King may be some of Wild Beast's most consistent and accessible music, but at a price: It comes dangerously close to predictable, something the band never would have been called before.
Wild Beasts' Boy King replaces the ornate detail of its predecessors with machine-tooled funk and pitch-shifted gasps. It's by no means a disaster, but it is a disappointment.
Believing it’s possible to critique toxic masculinity, even while displaying it proudly, Boy King approaches a kind of social satire.
Even with a sheen of knowing ironicism, the spectacle of cocky white males subverting gender binaries to bolster their inherent phallic force feels completely tired, not to mention irrelevant to an ever-more-diverse musical landscape.
On Boy King, Wild Beasts' fifth LP, the band take on a more dance-oriented sound that doesn't pay off.
What a disappointed finale album. I didn't enjoy it that much even some qualities but ... Meh.
doesn’t really show off any of wild beast’s strengths often but when it does it goes hard
What a disappointed finale album. I didn't enjoy it that much even some qualities but ... Meh.
doesn’t really show off any of wild beast’s strengths often but when it does it goes hard
raucous dance album with exquisite vocals, catchy and singalong tunes and great song writing, fabulous stuff
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2 | Tough Guy 3:31 | |
3 | Alpha Female 3:44 | |
4 | Get My Bang 3:32 | |
5 | Celestial Creatures 4:27 | |
6 | 2BU 4:18 | |
7 | He the Colossus 4:10 | |
8 | Ponytail 3:38 | |
9 | Eat Your Heart Out Adonis 3:56 | |
10 | Dreamliner 4:44 |
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#47 | / | NME |
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