Speed, symmetry and sax solos: Courting might just have made their most daring album yet | Dork
Speed, symmetry and sax solos: Courting might just have made their most daring album yet
From electronic experiments to pop-rock splendor, Courting’s third album in as many years proves there’s always another creative rebirth around the corner.
In today’s music industry, there’s no time to be polite. With the public’s ever-reducing attention span, you need to make a point, make it quick, and then move on to the next thing. Don’t stick to the middle ground because it’s easy - make yourself heard by splitting opinion. That’s exactly what Liverpudlian alt-rock-slash-genre-defying quartet Courting have done, and it’s got them to their meteoric third album, ‘Lust for Life; Or How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story’ (hereafter known as ‘Lust for Life’ - we’re on the clock here, people).
Releasing three albums and an EP in three years is no mean feat, especially when they sound as different as Courting’s back catalogue. From the glitchy, electronica-based, ironically named debut album’ Guitar Music’, to the jangling pop-rock melodies of 2024 crowd-splitter ‘New Last Name’, lead singer Sean Murphy-O’Neill has never been one for mediocrity.
The sheer difference between ‘Guitar Music’ and ‘New Last Name’, linked by very little other than the band that made them, is what has allowed Courting to continue to innovate and push their own boundaries while also avoiding ‘tricky second album’ syndrome.
Out of the ashes of those first two albums comes their magnificent third, ‘Lust for Life’, blending together an opening violin solo, a deep house anthem, pop-rock vocoder moments, and blistering indie-rock anthems to create a record that sonically bursts at the seams, but keeps enough stitches in place to hold together as a cohesive unit.
For some bands, the drawing together of all these disparate threads might earn them the title of ‘experimental’. For Sean, though, this wide-ranging approach is just par for the course.
That’s not to say that there isn’t depth to what Courting are doing, with ‘Lust for Life’ being chock full of structural and logistical ideas that take risks and allow the band to evolve much like the titans they grew up listening to. Nonetheless, the whole purpose of the band is to create music that is fun both to play and to listen to, meddling with tempo, instrumentation, and melodic similarity to create an album you can’t help but listen to on repeat.
In many ways, the objective of the album was to take frowned-upon methods and rejuvenate them, breathing life into overused trash-pop and classic rock clichés in a way that made them cool, most clearly represented by the two-part album title.
This idea is distilled most clearly in the song ‘Lust for Life’, a three-part journey that travels from ‘A Brief Inquiry…’-era The 1975 synth-pop into 70s folk-rock, via a brief foray into arena rock through huge reverb guitars and mind-mashing drumlines.
He continues: “We used really trashy elements that are obviously fun and married them with pretentious stuff. Autotune, for example, is viewed as this lowbrow thing. It can be techy and stupid, but when it’s used right, it can be artistic and powerful.”
Possibly without even trying, Sean underlines an unspoken hypocrisy within the music industry. While the business values creativity and bending the accepted rules of songwriting, it still needs to sell a product, often trying to tie acts down into a certain box or genre identity. Courting, however, bridge this gap. By using commercial elements as a way to push the envelope, they help to continuously move the broader genres of indie rock and alt-pop in interesting directions.
They also manage to highlight unfair standards that rock bands have to meet in order to be considered worthy of listeners. Producing three albums in as many years, keeping their album to below half an hour in total, and referencing overtly pop-centric influences are celebrated in certain parts of the industry - but not for rock bands.
“We’re a proper band, in the old sense of the word,” Sean reveals. “The Beatles were producing two albums a year so that they could keep it interesting and fresh - that’s what we’re doing too.
“I think it’s so unfair the way that rock bands are treated for having short albums. If an electronic act or pop star makes an album that’s 20 or 25 minutes, nobody’s arsed, but the minute a rock band does that, it’s not allowed.
This approach makes its way into the band’s album production, focusing on a smaller number of songs that have the potential to go the distance, instead of writing hundreds of songs that never see the light of day.
This results in not only wholly authentic work but also the ability to write and record quickly, filtering the energy and electricity in the room back into the music that the band ultimately produces.
You can never know everything, though, with the band deliberately challenging themselves to layer in ideas that subvert people’s preconceived thoughts about what the band is going to do next. It would be too easy otherwise, right?
The shared melody of ‘INTRO’ and closing track ‘Likely Place for Them to Be’, the lyrical satire of ‘Namcy’ and ‘Eleven Sent (This Time)’, or the simple existence of dance-rock bangers ‘After You’ and ‘Pause At You’ evidence a band perfecting their skills as they go, yet somehow managing to nail it every time. ‘New Last Name’ might have been divisive, but ‘Lust for Life’ feels like a grand unifier.
Where does a band that is constantly evolving go next, then?
“I think the first album was throwing everything at the wall, whereas album two was a closer study of melody. This one feels like we’ve expanded on both of those fronts; it’s a melting pot of what we liked as kids and the stuff we wanna push forward.
Whatever Courting decide to do next, there’s little doubt that they’ll do it anything other than boldly. If life feels as good as Courting sound, then it’s understandable why you’d lust after it. ■
Taken from the April 2025 issue of Dork.Courting’s album ‘Lust for Life; Or How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story’ is out 14th March.
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