There were a few comments that it was maybe too pop, but I see it in the lineage of big Vaccines singles. I remember the second I wrote this song, being very excited about it. Not necessarily wanting to die-more wanting to throw caution to the wind, doing whatever you want. “There is a bit of a theme across the record of fatalism. It was written on the exact same week as all the songs that you love and know already.’” It’s funny when you see the odd comment on social media, ‘This isn’t The Vaccines I know.’ I like reminding myself that, ‘Actually, yes, it is. We picked it up for this record, too, and very nearly dropped it but ended up in a place where we all fell in love with it. We picked it up again for Combat Sports and, again, couldn’t make it sound right within the context of that record. It felt a bit ham-fisted and we wanted to try to create a bit more nuance around the arrangement, instrumentation, and production. I wrote ‘Alone Star’ on Monday and we just couldn’t get it right. And I ended up writing all of the singles in a week-‘Dream Lover’ on the Tuesday, ‘20/20’ on the Wednesday, ‘Handsome’ on the Thursday. “I was told quite far into the writing process of English Graffiti, our third record, that we didn’t have any singles. I imagine this song existing in quite a similar space. Just as we were pulling into Vegas, the sun was going down and the neon lights were firing up. I always remember driving, a few years ago, from San Francisco to Vegas with some friends, taking all day. The first verse, I’m singing about arriving in Love City. “We were trying to write something that was kind of garage-y and a little punky but had more of a disco or fun groove to it. That keeps me awake at night.” Here, he talks us through this particular solution, track by track. “You want to remain interested and interesting and keep pushing yourself forward, but you want to pull everyone along with you. “We’ve always tried to evolve but, at the same time, figure out our core and what makes The Vaccines The Vaccines,” he says. The songs imagine a dystopia where emotions are finite commodities-with Love City as a place where you can replenish your stocks for the right price.įor Young, it’s an album that goes some way to solving the enduring puzzle of songwriting. Young jokingly calls it “Morricone indie-rock” and uses it as a backdrop for lyrics that explore how human expression is becoming increasingly binary. The music that emerged embellishes their punk spirit and pop nous with disco flourishes, industrial clangs, and a distinctive flavor of spaghetti Westerns. They were excited by the songs they’d written and inspired by the studio-Sonic Ranch, a sprawling residential complex in the middle of a pecan orchard near El Paso, Texas. “So, in many ways, we are a new band,” says Young. It’s the first album they’ve made as a five-piece, adding drummer Yoann Intonti to a lineup of keyboardist Timothy Lanham (who came on board for 2018’s Combat Sports) and founding members Young, guitarist Freddie Cowan, and bassist Árni Árnason. I think we got a little bit lost along the way.”Īlmost a decade later, The Vaccines felt rejuvenated by recording Back in Love City. “We were obsessed with building on the first record, not just in terms of how good it was, but how big it was. On the back of a platinum-selling debut of effervescent garage rock, 2011’s What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?, they were ravenously anointed as the saviors of guitar music by the UK press. There’s a purity to all of it.” The Londoners felt that spirit being squeezed out of them early on. “You’re not crippled with self-doubt, not overthinking things. “One of the reasons a band’s most successful record is often their first one is because there is this youthful, reckless abandon,” singer/guitarist Justin Young tells Apple Music. While making their fifth album, The Vaccines experienced something they hadn’t felt for a while: youthfulness.
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