Two years is a long stretch to leave fans waiting, and Franklin Gotham have chosen to break the silence not with a whisper but with a sunburnt holler. "Sunshine & Gasoline" arrives less like a comeback single and more like a band flinging open the windows of a clapped-out estate car and gunning it down the nearest coastal road, windows down, decorum abandoned at the petrol station.
The Alexandria outfit have spent over a decade quietly building a reputation on folk-tinged sincerity, the kind of band who sound like they mean it even when the chord changes are obvious. Here, though, they've swapped the campfire for a beach bar. Gone is the driving alt-indie crunch that powered their earlier work; in its place sits a loose-limbed, reggae-inflected shuffle that owes a debt to The Elovaters' unhurried pocket while borrowing some of Milky Chance's scuffed, half-acoustic charm. It's a combination that ought to feel calculated, assembled from a focus group's idea of "summer," yet the band carry it off with enough conviction to mostly silence the cynic in the room.
The opening guitar scratch is the record's smartest move — a small, itchy gesture that promises momentum before the song has earned it, like a engine revving before the clutch drops. From there it builds dutifully toward a chorus clearly engineered with festival fields in mind: arms aloft, strangers harmonising badly, somebody's flip-flop lost in the mud. Whether it actually lands at Glastonbury or merely in adverts for hire cars remains to be seen, but the ambition is plainly stitched into every bar.
Lyrically, this is well-trodden turf — open roads, dawn horizons, the performative shrugging-off of regret that has powered a thousand summer singles before it, Springsteen's ghost riding shotgun the whole way. Nobody will accuse Franklin Gotham of reinventing the road-trip song, and to their credit they don't seem to be trying to. What they're after is feeling rather than novelty, and on that more modest ambition the track largely delivers. The vocal harmonies are the record's quiet strength: warm, unfussy, stacked with the kind of ease that suggests a band comfortable in their own skin rather than chasing a trend they've only just discovered.
"Sunshine & Gasoline" does its job. It announces a band loosening their collar, trading earnestness for ease, and betting that audiences will follow them wherever the tank takes them next — be that the moodier "Lisboa" or their reportedly reimagined take on The Human League's "Fascination." On this evidence, the journey will be agreeable enough. Just don't expect to remember the scenery.
**Verdict:** Breezy, well-meaning, and entirely safe — a postcard from a band easing back into the sun rather than chasing the horizon.