Album review: Thecityisours – Will You Still Love Me

At the beginning of Hot Mess, the third song on Thecityisours’ third album, there’s an unintentionally meta cheerleader chant. 'H-O-T M-E-S-S / He thinks he’s got it figured out, he’s a hot mess.'

The song itself lives up to its name, its hulking riffs and barked vocals awkwardly segueing into a sprightly pop chorus that’s a complete tonal mismatch from what came before. Unfortunately, the earlier cheerleader chant befits not just the song, but the entire record.

The London quartet’s ambitions are writ large – to be open-minded, destroying genre boundaries, et cetera et cetera. Even so, it’s not that novel and it’s not that well executed, either. The clunky, murmured verses of opener Shame sound disjointed next to its sledgehammer chorus, while Psycho’s messy fusion of metalcore and rap metal is like an answer to the (unasked) question of 'What if we ordered FEVER 333 from Wish?'. Sometimes disparate sounds are flimsily glued together in a garish collage, from a saxophone in the confused pop-metal of Hush! Hush! that’s the wrong flavour of ‘WTF’ to an odd burst of fast rapping during In The Dark.

Really, the problem is that they’re just doing far too much. Any sense of cohesion is lobbed out the window, and by mashing together scraps of what others bands have done before they fail to establish any real sense of identity. There’s still some good ideas glinting through – I See You is tighter and has some crushing riffs, while Dopamine and Freak Like You are decently fun pop-rock cuts even though they jar with heavier songs elsewhere. Then there’s Enough, which shapes up to bring the album to a colossal close, but then just as things seem promising, there’s a corny key change.

Will you Still Love Me is perhaps more memorable than other records of its ilk. Sadly, it isn’t memorable for the reasons the band would likely hope.

Verdict: 2/5

For fans of: Wage War, Architects, I Prevail

Will You Still Love Me is released on January 31 via Arising Empire