Lime Garden announce new album with dancefloor filler ’23’
Brighton four-piece Lime Garden have announced their second album, Maybe Not Tonight, with the buoyant opening single, ’23’.
The track throbs with the anticipation of a night out as the band tries and fails to shake a distinctly mid-20s anxiety. As vocalist and guitarist, Chloe Howard, explained: “The concept was born from a dream I had where I was talking to my younger self. In the dream, I was essentially ripping into my own personality and lack of success.”
This nightmarish self-flagellation is juxtaposed with a lopsided groove, as Howard tries on bigger, rounder vocals that add a new, exciting flair to the offering. It’s reminiscent of some of Declan McKenna’s earlier works, a way into the versatile, eclectic, and imaginative soundscape, which experiments with bold new textures.
The accompanying music video starts with a “Who is Elliot Smith?” meme poster and a CD announcing the single’s title that is a carbon copy of the ‘That’s What I Call Music’ annual volumes, which collated the biggest tracks of a time period, becoming an important marker for the sonic personality of a specifically-defined era.
As such, Lime Garden chooses to pull us off our seats through the clammy hands of nostalgia, an astute recognition that the before-times might have been the better times.
However, the track is saved from this backwards-looking gaze through the funky, imaginative effects used throughout, most notably on the frog-like bass line, conjured through a Happy Mondays–inspired jam, croaking simplistically beneath the deceptively twinkly guitar.
Lime Garden promises that the album, which will chart the entirety of a night out from the happy-go-lucky beginning to the melancholic end, will expand their signature wonk-pop “upwards and outwards”.
On ’23’, they turn up the heat, but the sound is still somewhat bloated, waiting to burst. The goal is lined up, no goalie in sight. With Maybe Not Tonight, Lime Garden needs only shoot on target to score a blinder.
Maybe Not Tonight is slated for an April 10th release via So Young Records
Lime Garden – ‘Maybe Not Tonight’ tracklist:
- ’23’
- ‘Cross My Heart’
- ‘Downtown Lover’
- ‘All Bad Parts’
- ‘Maybe Not Tonight’
- ‘Body ‘
- ‘Lifestyle’
- ‘Undressed’
- ‘Always Talking About You’
- ‘Do You Know What I’m Thinking’
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