ALBUM REVIEW: Love and Loathing – With Confidence

It’s been a long, busy summer for Australian trio WITH CONFIDENCE. Having won over critics with their pop-punk debut Better Weather back in 2016, the band have seamlessly slotted into the tween scene with ease and just finished up an extended stint on the last ever Vans Warped Tour. With a whole heap of spotlight experience now under their belts, WITH CONFIDENCE have been busy working on their second record Love and Loathing; a sickly sweet pop-punk offering that screams of love, heartbreak, hope and fun in the summer sun.

Love and loathing is not a huge departure from their first album, but rather a more polished extension of a winning formula that has the potential to launch the band into a whirlwind career. Opener That Something takes no time in proving so: its catchy chorus steeped in playful guitar riffs and sparkly vocal harmonies promises to be stuck in your head for days, whether you like it or not. It’s the same on The Turnaround and Jaded; both tracks race to head-bopping heights while the vocal paring of Jayden Seeley and Inigo Del Carmen spark images of singing (badly) in the shower at the top of your lungs.

The structures and textures of back to basics pop-punk are repeated throughout all twelve songs, each brimming with nostalgic sentiments, punchy drums with softened snare that tiptoes on the edge of being cliché: “Wake up to the absence of your body / I’ll box all our memories a burden … I hope you’re ready coz you’re gonna sleep alone tonight / We’re temporary and you’re moving further out of sight,” sings Seeley in Moving Boxes, “I’ll be fine / we both know it / I hope you’re better off without me / In your bed and sleeping soundly, dreaming in the arms of someone new…” he croons on acoustic number Paquerette (Without Me).

The inherent elements of mid-to-late noughties homages on Love and Loathing are rife, at taking huge queues from their contemporaries while attempting to pass them off as their own. Sing To Me and Better sound like if LOWER THAN ATLANTIS had been on a Tinder date with FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE, skipped the food, downed too many lagers and nine months later birthed a beast you never knew you wanted, while Icarus could easily be the baby brother of PARAMORE’s Ain’t It Fun; all three updated to encapsulate those aspects into 2018.

Sweet sorrows, upbeat hopefulness and a sense of reckless youth brings the album back around to where it began in closer Tails, as a group chorus announces the triumphant departure of all the, well, pop-punk. For a record that many will love to hate and hate to love, sadly Love and Loathing has all the pieces slotting into all the right places to make it pop back into your head when you least expect it. Already on the right path, despite sexual allegations emerging in the latter half of 2017 which resulted in a member being booted out of the band, WITH CONFIDENCE aren’t disappearing out of the limelight anytime soon, and it seems Love and Loathing is a record fighting to prove the band have a right to stay.

Rating: 7/10

Love and Loathing is out now via Hopeless Records.

Like WITH CONFIDENCE on Facebook.