Our Last Night – Left Alone | Album Review

After countless covers, Our Last Night announced their new album in quite an original way. It's just a shame the record itself doesn't carry much originality.

Since February, the band best known as a covers act decided to release one song each week with its own music video, and create a countdown until the official release of Left Alone on May 8th. This eponymous track has been the first single they launched out, and that is what Our Last Night does best: metalcore mixed with pop vibes, vibrant choirs and a spark of heaviness. If you have been familiar with the band along the years, it is their vibrant signature and we all roll with it. They caught us with catchy choruses that move us straight to our hearts. It is something recognizable in tracks like ‘Tidal Wave’ or ‘Strange Animals’.

The Wentworth’s brothers vocals (Trevor, singer, and Matt, vocals and guitar) get along perfectly on smooth notes that ride with the screams. It sounds like an old friend that they brought back for their new music. Something really Our Last Night-ish. Through their lyrics, they always know how to ease people. It is however a comfort zone that they never seem to break, which leads to an evergoing ‘already-heard’ cycle. ‘Scared To Die’ appears to follow the comfort road on a mix of a ballad and screams. In a strange way, the sentence ‘I’m not afraid of death but I’m scared to die’ seems like a beautiful lullaby one could sing. This record is all about the melancholy and nostalgia that embrace it, though, it is lacking some sparks of change and shift of energies. Enough talk about the music, let’s now focus on the journey that the music videos brought us.

It tells the tale of a young woman who falls in love with a guy and the first steps of their story, before moving into his place. We find out later that he wasn’t as sane as expected as he sequestrated her in a room. The album explains how, between an alcoholic father and screen addiction, the protagonist turned into the man that he is now. He tries to conquer the girl by offering her a dance and flowers. She proceeds to then to stab him, not forgiving him for what he did. The band here offers lyrics related to the music video, making us understand better what is the meaning of it, as the words are turned into images.

The most recognisable one has to be found in the pop punk vibe from ‘NPC’. It describes perfectly someone who is absent and unable to think by themselves, as a criticism of today’s society. It is quite fresh compared to the heaviness of the rest of the album, though it is enlightened by some raw screams.  The record then gets darker, with ‘Better Than You’, where the protagonist of the short movie has been battling very hard to be different from what his family taught him. The melancholic side, full of hope, encapsulates that cry for help, though it will stop at the last song, ‘Erase Me’. It has a heavy and powerful side, as the song grows as it gets along, it is eclectic and even emotional in a way. That is a perfect ending to an album who turned out to be, quite frankly, quite mid. Songs like this would have empowered the whole album and turned it into something memorable. 

Left Alone has been a journey through old demons that seemed to be upon us as we keep looking for a better day to day life. The fight is constant through what the past could have taught us and this is told in ‘Version Of me’, that is deliberately pushing it back to the past. Although originality and creativity have prevailed through the marketing of this last album, Our Last Night has not fallen into the latter. Where the idea of the album itself has been quite interesting and innovative, the very form of the music has been the same through the whole album, making it redundant.