The French trio of Pierre-Yo (guitars/vocals), Magali (drums) and Léa (bass), better known as This Will Destroy Your Ears (TWDYE) first assaulted the ears of the listening public with 2019’s Clear, following it up in 2022 with Everybody knows Mickey. Now they’re back with new album Funland, an album heavily inspired by the time the trio spent in one of the UK’s premiere tourist spots – Blackpool, a place that’s both a sonic and visual assault on your ears in the height of the season, but is a strangely desolate and depressing place when the lights are off and all the tourists have gone home, and that’s what we have here. An album that strives to encompass both the beauty and the desolation, that veers from triumphant highs to shuddering, depressive lows.
Kicking things off is the aptly named ‘Gorgeous Eve Holds a Banger Hammer’ and that’s a great way to describe this opening track, an ode to Blackpool itself and all the fascinating characters the band encountered there, including a karaoke pirate, a hopeful angel and a slightly sloshed mermaid. A high energy piece that, just to be contrary, implores you to “C-A-L-M, take it slow, don’t freak out.” A lot of the tracks are like this. Just under this post-punk, noise rock surface there’s a soulful Indie heartbeat. It’s all too easy to enjoy the songs at face value, but once you listen more closely to what’s being said, you find a subversive streak running through the lyrics, sometimes subtle, sometimes not, with cutting lines like “Sometimes I wish you’d been swallowed by your mum”.
From the glassy, almost gothic guitars of ‘No More Letters’ to the anthemic ‘Stop That Wacky Show’ and the grinding, snarling, downbeat growl that is ‘Pill Pop Night’, TWDYE run the gamut of emotions on this record. You never quite know what you’re going to get next and just when you think you might have things figured out, when you think the ground under your feet is solid, they change things up and you’re left scrambling again. Funland is an angry album, a joyous album, a depressing album, an album brimming with an excess of emotion, spiralling from beautiful highs to heart-weary lows.
And so the album winds to a close with “Lost our Track” and even here there is no respite, no high note to end on that isn’t frayed at the edges, the lustre tarnished, the listener left to soak it all in and take stock as that final, plaintive “Drunk, walking down the line/further on and faster than/we lost our track” fades into nothing. Funland. It’s a fine place to visit, and a ride worth taking.