With the door into the house, or in this case: With the transience in the middle of the standstill, the seventh album of the Kooks falls. “The Times Are Changing But You Stay the Same,” Luke Sings as if it were for him alone. Sounds Never/Know as if the band wanted to go back to blessed early days. No more experiments, no electronics, no sloping tones, instead guitar and bass are dubbed, the singing beautifully laconic, the melodies catchy.
Not only by “/” in the album title, The Kooks try to conjure up the carefree audition of the naive, not only in the hit “Naïve”, but now for almost two decades -old debut albums inside/inside out, which combined so wonderfully youthful carefreeness with a fashionable melancholy. In rare moments, of all things, in “If They Only Could Kind”, in which Pritchard wistfully remembers his parents and wishes that they have still experienced that their offspring found the luck.
But as in “Arrow Through Me”, the search for the lightness of the early days can also be lost in trouble or in the penetrant sunny “Sunny Baby” right away: “When you love me you make me feel ten Foot Tall.” You not only notice that Pritchhard can do snapy melodies, but it is not the gifted poet when he rhymes with “Take me down to love street” on “You hit me like a freight train”. Yes, “It’s Tough at the Top”, because Haste Haste, Luke, but no longer at the top of the height.
You can find out which albums were still published in May 2025 via our monthly publication list.