Bolton has given us many things over the years: Fred Dibnah, Peter Kay, a football club with an improbable habit of punching above its weight. And now, apparently, the most unapologetically joyful piece of indie pop punk to land on these shores in quite some time. “Let’s Party Like It’s The 90s,” the third digital single from this Boltonian teenage outfit, arrives with all the subtlety of a house party spilling onto the street at midnight \u2014 which is, of course, precisely the point.<\/p>
Let us dispense with false modesty on the band’s behalf, since they seem disinclined to practise any themselves: this is a very good song. Two minutes and forty-nine seconds of arms-aloft, throat-raw, absolutely unhinged singalong energy, recorded at The Nave \u2014 the Kaiser Chiefs’ own studio in Leeds \u2014 and produced by Andy Hawkins, the man responsible for shaping records by Maximo Park and The Pigeon Detectives. That pedigree matters. This doesn’t sound like a bedroom demo or a rehearsal room fever dream. It sounds like a band who know exactly what they’re doing being guided by someone who absolutely knows what they’re doing, and the result crackles with a kind of focused abandon that is genuinely difficult to manufacture.<\/p>
The track opens with a guitar lick \u2014 tight, immediately memorable, the kind of riff that lodges itself somewhere behind your left ear and refuses to vacate the premises \u2014 before detonating into a chorus of almost reckless generosity. Choruses like this don’t happen by accident. They are engineered through some alchemy of instinct, craft, and a probably unhealthy obsession with the Britpop era that the song explicitly invokes. The verses, meanwhile, deal in recognisable social comedy: the hopeless pursuit of someone gorgeous across a chaotic house party, the navigation of those tedious individuals who are, in the song’s own precise taxonomy, “all full of it.” It is, in other words, a document of being young and wanting things and the world being simultaneously wonderful and maddening \u2014 which is, when you think about it, what the best pop songs have always been about.<\/p>
The 90s nostalgia angle could easily have curdled into pastiche. It doesn’t. The band aren’t dressing up as Supergrass for a fancy-dress night; they’ve metabolised that era’s essential spirit \u2014 its communal euphoria, its guitar-first directness, its complete absence of ironic distance \u2014 and translated it into something that feels genuinely present-tense. The title is knowing, but the execution is sincere, and sincerity at this velocity is a rare and rather beautiful thing.<\/span><\/p> There is something else worth noting. This single has already been broadcast at Bolton Wanderers’ stadium before kick-off \u2014 a detail that tells you everything about the song’s function and its frequency. This is music designed for shared spaces, for crowds of people who don’t know each other choosing, for three minutes, to become the same organism. It has been selected as This Feeling’s Song of the Day and placed on their “Best New Bands” Spotify playlist, accolades that carry genuine weight in the current ecosystem. The band’s debut vinyl EP, *MMXXV*, sold its entire limited run of 200 copies through pre-orders alone, months before release, with copies subsequently surfacing at multiples of their original price on collector forums \u2014 which is either a sign of extraordinary demand or extraordinary restraint in pressing quantities, and probably both.<\/span><\/p> A 16-date England tour follows, culminating at The Deaf Institute in Manchester in late July, and if the live show matches the single’s barely-contained kinetic energy \u2014 and all available evidence suggests it does \u2014 those rooms are going to be absolutely magnificent. The Deaf Institute show in particular feels like a genuine marker: not a band still finding their feet, but one already sprinting.<\/span><\/p> The Radio Addicts are, by any reasonable measure, still at the beginning of this story. They are teenagers from Bolton with guitars and something urgent to say and the technical means to say it properly. “Let’s Party Like It’s The 90s” is their boldest statement yet \u2014 radio-ready in the best possible sense, which is to say it sounds brilliant on speakers in a car at volume but would also survive being played acoustically in a field. The summer anthem competition has, quietly, been won.<\/span><\/p> *Watch them. Remember the name.*<\/span><\/p> *”Let’s Party Like It’s The 90s” is out now on all major streaming platforms.*<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/www.theradioaddicts.com\/<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
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