The Itch – ‘It’s The Hope That Kills You’ album review: Despondency learns how to dance
After leaving behind Fifa-soundtrack-ready guitar ballads cooked up by their former Interpol-adjacent indie band, Regressive Left, London‘s hottest ticket, The Itch, have released a shimmering, sardonic, and stylistic debut.
The Skinny: Modernity-induced ennui most often has us all lost for words, beyond the ubiquitous British sentiment that everything is just a bit naff, really. But on It’s The Hope That Kills You, The Itch, consisting of long-time collaborators and Luton stars Georgia Hardy and Simon Tyrie, have created an antidote to the over-exposed modern psyche.
Citing LCD Soundsystem and The Dare as key contemporaries, while listening to Sega Bodega and Kate Bush during the album’s creation, the duo fuses indie sleaze, Britpop, synth-pop, and art-rock with the same maturity as such household names. They bring even more references than genres to the table, as the likes of ‘Aux Romanticiser’ pulls from internet-hit series Subway Takes, while seven-minute industry debut ‘Ursula’ shimmers with the undervalued tale of Ursula K Le Guin’s sci-fi novel, The Dispossessed.
While Tyrie’s voice has a decadent, mellifluous nature that happily marries the wobbling, disparate elements of the expansive sonic palette, some of the album’s standout moments are in the buoyant latter half of the tracks, where the instrumentals build like the apex of a night out. In the cost-of-living crisis anthem ‘Can’t Afford This’, industrial percussion nitpicks at carthweeling synths, while ‘Switch It Off’ pairs a grimy guitar with a rocky bassline.
The album might not boast this level of continued success in some of the bolder swings it makes: on ‘Radio Frequencies’, the momentum of the sticky-floor side-step is lost, while on the darker single ‘Never Change’, a spoken-word segment is more abrasive than aesthetic.
Still, the album is both politically charged, calling out “the freaks in the USA [who] just want some blood sports,” as well as refreshingly humourous, as Tyrie admits he is “sick of The Fall, I’m sick of it all,” as he pleads for “no more sprechsgang” with wry solemnity in a single that takes aim at the delusional parameters of the arena they are forced to play house within. The Itch are a band making up the rules as they go.
The Verdict: It’s The Hope That Kills You is certainly one of the strongest debuts of the year; sweaty, meticulous, and deliciously realistic, The Itch have stuffed just about everything into this exuberant affair; except, of course, sprechsgang.
Standout Track: ‘It’s The Hope That Kills You’
Release Date: April 10th, 2026 | Label: Fiction Records / I Oh You
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