Bad Boy Chiller Crew wants to be known for more than their silliness. Never mind the videos of them slugging Smirnoff from the bottle and retching in an alley, or cackling in the passenger seat as they churn through prank calls. Ignore the allegations that one member went to the hospital with a kidney infection after a fan hurled an ounce of ketamine on stage at a show. There they are showing up to the BRIT Awards in a horse and carriage, sharing their tips to avoid a hangover (“Get straight back on it”) and vowing to chop one of the boy’s mullets if their album tops the charts. The trio from Northern England makes frenetic tracks that slam through your skull; the songs explode like a shaken Coke bottle. In the Bad Boy Chiller Crew cinematic universe, every bender leaks into the next—“From the nightclub to the kitchen!” as the boys howl in one of their better new tracks. They make lifelong friends in urinals. They get high, get into hijinks, and get home just in time to hit up an endless blur of clubs. It’s because, not in spite of, this central goofiness that the Bradford boys have found such a broad audience. “People automatically wanna be our friends because we make the world look like a fucking joke,” one of the boys told British GQ; it’s also a large part of why so many listen.
Influential, the group’s latest release, is a bloated bridge between their frenzied bangers and a bid for the mainstream. “We’re going for commercial,” the boys have said in interviews, and with every release, they’ve gotten closer to that goal. Even though they strive to show off their range, the project feels more disparate and distracted than expansive. They wobble between blown-out bangers and a pitched-down Cher interpolation (“Believe”), treacly odes to girls they met at a club on a Tuesday (“Found True Love [You’re the Best Thing]”), wailing wonders about where their soul has gone. They demand to know if love is “true.” “Thought we could have set in stone,” they rap at one point. “Now you’re nothing but a stepping stone.” It’s clever-enough wordplay, but too flimsy to elicit any feeling, and too earnest to excuse as a bit.
Of course, you don’t turn to the Bad Boy Chiller Crew to learn about love. The boys work best when they bludgeon a sample: They take a shimmery vocal and pound any melodrama out of it, thwacking bass drops, grunts, sirens, and bleats over lilting lines about love and fame. Influential lingers way too long on other voices: “Why Did You Play Me” spends 45 seconds with Kyla, of “One Dance” fame, before the Bad Boy Chiller Crew barrels in. “Say Goodbye” begins with a wispy female vocalist pledging eternal devotion for nearly a minute, until the B.B.C.C. steamrolls through, chanting about drinks on tap. They edge dangerously close to sounding like Cascada.
Compared to the fricative pulses of a song like “Bounce to This One,” or the coked-out wallop of “Sliding,” the love songs here are chintzy sugar rushes. The less sense they make, the better they sound. Why are they frantically rapping about how badly they want to go into space? What’s with the squiggle of bagpipes in “Jurgen Kropper,” one of two throbbing tracks named after football players? They remix a 2007 rave anthem from DJ Q, a stalwart of the sped-up cousin of UK garage known as bassline, into a song that sounds like the “Cha Cha Slide” on poppers. Bad Boy Chiller Crew dazzles and delights in absurdity.
That’s not to say they can’t also make you feel something. “Memory” is the most successful song here at smuggling in an actual emotion, likely because the boys sing it themselves. “I want to be there with you, but I can’t trust nobody,” they murmur, before the beat hiccups and accelerates. No matter how hard they try to make themselves palatable to the masses, they’re still most comfortable in chaos.
