Welcome to the DCC. 

That is the first lyric you’ll hear when you check out Nothing But Thieves’ latest album Dead Club City. This is the band’s 4th studio album, released on June 30th this past summer. A little fun fact to include is that the band finished the album on my birthday: the 31st of January. 

What I really enjoy about this album is how much it explores the band’s sound and further shows off the tonal diversity the band is capable of achieving while still maintaining the band’s core sound. Each member has their own distinct voice, attack, and phrasing on their instrument that I really just can’t get enough of on this album. You have a hard-hitting track like “Pop The Balloon” which has an intense raw-sounding guitar that pairs so well with Connor Mason’s vocals making it a beautiful and dark symphony. In contrast to that track, we can turn to the song, “Green Eyes :: Siena” which is somewhat of a song we have seen before by Nothing But Thieves but this shines some light on the emotional pull that this band can always come back to and change it in a new style. 

I noted that ever since the band’s release of the previous album, Moral Panic I really have enjoyed the introduction to more synth usage that is not overbearing in the sound that they try to go for. Especially in the context of rock music, it is important to decide just the right samples for your synthesizer because you don’t want it to sound too 80s.

In addition to the synths on this album, I couldn’t help but notice the great-sounding drums on this record. Sound engineering live drums is no easy feat to achieve and each drum sound seems like they were specially tailored for each track. The flow and vibe for each drum take I can tell was a huge thing they wanted to be prominent for each song. This level of production is impressive and I specifically want to applaud them for not making everything sound too overproduced. This can be a hard thing to achieve nowadays… cough cough to the rock-sounding bands that have overproduced heavy guitars. It’s like I can hear that tone in my head right now and is giving me a headache so let’s move on.

What I really want to touch on last is that I enjoyed listening to this album from start to finish in one sitting. It really made me enjoy the album’s experience to listen to it from front to back because the placement of each track in the order seems like the band wanted to take you on a journey. That I did. I think it’s really cool when artists do this because to me it feels like the music and the sound is a more complete piece of art that we all know took a lot of time and effort to craft.

I think this is something that Nothing But Thieves pulled off very well, pushing the envelope of rock music into a state in which the genre itself can continue to evolve and adapt. It’s really refreshing to see and I can’t wait for what this band has in store for all of us to enjoy next.

My favorite Tracks on Dead Club City:

• Overcome
• City Haunts
• Do You Love Me Yet?
• Members Only
• Foreign Language
• Pop The Balloon

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