There is a sick and twisted irony to the fact that singer Foxes, real name Louisa Rose Allen, tested positive for Covid-19 last week, just two days before the drop of her third album, The Kick.
Not least because The Kick is arriving a lengthy six years after the release of her last album, 2016’s All I Need. It’s been a long time coming, and Allen deserves to be celebrating, not housebound with the plague. Beyond this, though, it feels particularly unfair as The Kick arguably fits the brief for a euphoric, post-pandemic pop album more than anything else released since 2020.
Disco-tinged, futuristic odes to the dance floor like Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia and Lady Gaga’s Chromatica arrived just weeks after this whole shitfest began when our dance floors doubled up as living rooms, which doubled up as offices. The music figuratively set us free, but couldn’t literally.
Now, as the UK tiptoes towards a world of living with Covid-19, The Kick sounds somewhat like a backdrop to freedom. It is light and sparky, stuffed to the brim with sticky pop hooks and airy synths. Opener and undeniable standout ‘Sister Ray’ is a literal ode to those fleeting moments of pure, unfiltered elation on a night out, when the music feels like electricity in your veins.
Staccato would-be hits ‘Growing On Me’ and the 80s-inspired ‘Potential’ are fun and flirty, throwing back to a time where starting a brand new relationship came only with occasional pangs of doubt and fluttery stomachs, not the risk of a subsequent positive lateral flow test. ‘Sky Love’ soars, bubbling with a desire to find love that is meaningful but reads more like a call for human contact during a time of intense isolation.
It is not surprising that this is the record that Allen has delivered. Recorded during lockdown, entirely over Zoom, it is of the moment and fueled by our collective desire to see the world from outside our four walls. Allen herself said she felt a “wild and animalistic feeling of needing and wanting to socialise again” while creating the album.
Listening to The Kick top to bottom, you can almost hear the desire to dance, the need for liberation, grinding against the frustration of not leaving the house. One of the most recent singles prior to the album’s release, ‘Absolute’, captures the mood perfectly: “Feels like I’m looking at my body from the ceiling // This time I think I wanna lose control.”
There is a lot of joy to be found on The Kick, but there is also genuine sadness and prickly heartbreak. Beneath the thumping, glitzy synths of ‘Two Kinds of Silence’ are lyrics that go straight for the heart: “Our love is never violent // But it’s quiet // And it’s almost worse.” The soulful, sparkling ‘Gentleman’ opens with a killer, too: “You drove me to paradise and pushed me out of the car // Saw me in the rearview bleeding from my heart // But you never stopped.”
It is the final track, ‘Too Much Colour’ that overtly goes for the heartstrings – a piano-strung, morning-after-the-party ballad in kaleidoscopic tones. It’s a little cliche to end an album pumped with so much energy on a song so dainty, but it is beautiful nonetheless. Other minor duds include ‘Dance Magic’ which, while a fan favourite, sounds like a first draft, and ‘Body Suit’, a woozy, out-of-place jam about shagging.
All in all, though, there is so much to love about The Kick. It showcases Foxes, now a decade into her pop career, at a new peak. There is confidence and cohesion and direction. It is a time capsule, containing an era where the closest we got to a night out was an extra glass of Pinot on a Friday, where burgeoning relationships shrivelled under the weight of stifled Tinder talk. Luckily for us, we can enjoy it where it was meant to be listened to: out in the real world.
Words by Marcus Wratten
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