“I hate this country, and I hate this island – but sometimes the people make it all worthwhile,” sings Simon Tyrie on ‘Space In The Cab’, the wonky disco banger that kicks off The Itch’s debut album ‘It’s The Hope That Kills You’. The track cuts decadent club euphoria with a general feeling of unease while calling out Britain’s slowly eroding nightlife scene. Across the ten infectious songs that follow, The Itch – Tyrie and Georgia Hardy – push back against everyday rage, disillusionment and frustration with party-starting electro-punk tracks that demand human connection.
The community celebration has been there since the start. After years of making music together, Hardy and Tyrie formed The Itch after taking part in the annual Byrne’s Night gig, which sees members of various bands (The Last Dinner Party, Goat Girl, Dream Wife, Shame and more) covering Talking Heads classics. Those shows are spontaneous, chaotic and champion having fun in a room filled with like-minded people. It’s little surprise, then, that ‘It’s The Hope That Kills You’ is an urgent, upbeat, messy record that’s all about togetherness.
The playful ‘No More Sprechgesang’ pokes fun at the music industry’s recent obsession with angular guitars and the South London scene (something Hardy and Tyrie experienced first-hand with former buzzy band Regressive Left), ‘Pirate Studios’ is a scuzzy ode to DIY house shows against the backdrop of war, boredom and the “freaks in the USA who just want some bloodsports” while the blissed out ‘Drugdealer’ offers a dreamy slice of escapism. It is nostalgic while being fiercely relevant.
Still, for all the euphoria that The Itch conjure from their mash-up of nu-rave, britpop, indie sleaze and art rock, there’s plenty of understandable anger across the record too. ‘Can’t Afford This’ is a straight-shooting slice of post-disposable income punk, while the moody synth-pop of ‘Ursula’ takes inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 anarchic fantasy book ‘The Dispossessed’, with the lyrics veering from political revolution pub chat (“We could bring down the government, we could put their heads on spikes”) to wide-eyed hope for a better tomorrow.
The album covers a lot of ground, but all of its big ideas are underpinned by genuine humanity, be it ‘Radio Frequencies’ overlapping voicemail messages or the gorgeous spoken word poetry at the heart of the glitching, existential ‘Never Change’. In fact, the only thing not invited to The Itch’s decadent, freewheeling party is pessimism.
