Let us be clear about what this record is. It is not reinventing the wheel. It is not pretending to. What *Absolutely* does — and does with a confidence that belies the band's relative youth — is remind you precisely why the wheel was worth inventing in the first place. Elijah Jenkins, the band's singer and primary songwriter, has been writing these songs long enough for them to have acquired a certain internal logic, a coherence of feeling that mere technical proficiency cannot manufacture. There is something here that was clearly lived before it was performed.
The production, handled by Ady Hall and Lee McCarthy at Sugarhouse Studios in St Helens, deserves considerable credit. This is a record that sounds like a room full of people who have decided, collectively, to mean it. The guitars — Jenkins alongside Alfie Powell — arrive with that particular shimmer and crunch that British indie has periodically rediscovered in every decade since 1977 and which never, somehow, gets old. They drive the track forward with the urgency of people catching a last train, but leave space — crucially — for the song to breathe. George Bengree's bass anchors the whole enterprise with a low, purposeful throb, while Scott Disley's drumming hits hard enough to rattle the chest but smart enough to serve the song rather than merely display itself. These are four musicians who have, somewhere along the line, learned the most difficult lesson in rock and roll: restraint is not the enemy of power. It is its most effective instrument.
*Absolutely* builds. This matters more than it might sound. A great many contemporary guitar bands mistake noise for dynamics, substituting volume for drama and wondering why the listener remains unmoved. Movin' On understand that an anthem must earn its anthemia. The verses — more introspective, more tightly coiled — carry the suggestion of something about to give way, before the chorus arrives not so much as an explosion but as an inevitability. This is songwriting in the old tradition: tension, release, catharsis. Jenkins' vocal sits at the centre of it all with an unshowy intensity, a voice that has not yet been polished into blandness and is all the more compelling for it. There is grit in the grain of it.
The band take their name from a WhatsApp message, apparently, which is either charmingly prosaic or quietly poetic depending on your disposition. What is certain is that the name fits: this is music saturated with the bittersweet energy of departure, of something ending as something else begins. *Absolutely* captures that feeling in the way the best singles always have — not by explaining it, but by making you feel it in your sternum on the second chorus.
There are ghosts here, inevitably. You can hear echoes of the post-Britpop North West guitar tradition — the Verve's windswept grandeur, the Courteeners' urban romanticism, the Libertines' barely-controlled fervour — but Movin' On are not slavishly indebted to any of them. They've absorbed the influences rather than simply reproducing them, which is the difference between a band with a future and a band with a setlist of familiar shapes. The song is theirs. The feeling is theirs.
They headline the Jacaranda in Liverpool on March 28th. If the room is not shaking by the end, something has gone badly wrong. On the evidence of *Absolutely*, something will be going very right indeed.
Watch this band. They are, to borrow a word from the record itself, moving on — and they appear to know exactly where they're going.
*Released 2025 | Sugarhouse Studios, St Helens*