Over four albums, Wild Beasts’ snaky percussion, kaleidoscopic guitar lines, and equally comic and self-lacerating regard for masculinity gave them a unique standing in the British indie scene: just as beloved by beery gig-goers chanting their riffs as by those who wouldn’t usually touch a four-piece guitar band with a big stick. So it’s odd that their fifth album arrives with co-frontman Hayden Thorpe telling reporters, “We’ve become the band we objected to being”: The swaggering American rockers that they rebelled against in their schooldays. During a period of heartbreak, Thorpe realized that he’s just as bad as the macho beefcakes they’ve often lampooned, and saw two possible paths stemming from the electronic intricacy of their last record: lab-coat music, or to “don the leather jackets and embrace the chaos and carnal force of rock‘n’roll,” he said. “And it was always going to be the leather jackets route.”
Boy King was made in Dallas with John Congleton (St. Vincent, Swans), and replaces the ornate detail of its predecessors with machine-tooled funk and pitch-shifted gasps, aiming to marry Justin Timberlake’s groove with Nine Inch Nails’ aggression. Whereas 2014’s Present Tense extolled the spiritual fulfillment that can come from sex and love, their sole lyrical concern here is destruction at the hands of desire. The need to keep things fresh five albums in is understandable, and Wild Beasts should be smart enough to adapt.
But Boy King is their first misfire, bringing a sledgehammer to a nut-cracking party. Their outlook is facile and incurious: Sex is always deadly transgression; men tremble before the dominant women they idolize, like the “Alpha Female” who Thorpe would not hold back, “simple as that, yeah,... ooh-ooh-ooh.” In the past they often counterbalanced sincerity by warning of the evil inside, a relatable nod to the nastier tendencies that linger within most normal people. Here, their motives are one-dimensionally “evil.” “Do I dare to disturb the universe?/Lest I crush the softest among us?” Thorpe wonders on “He the Colossus,” as he contemplates an illicit shag. Wild Beasts’ wordiness has always been part of their charm, recasting beery street scenes as Hieronymus Bosch paintings and heartache as opulent palaces, but on Boy King, the overstatement is mostly facade, stripped of the subtlety and emotion that made their absurdity so appealing.
There’s something to be said for switching sides to know your enemy—even the enemy within—but references to a “virgin killer, ”a woman fluttering her “come-to-bed eyes,” and Tom Fleming seeing “death up the skirts of the world” are weak. Wild Beasts’ records until now had followed a linear trajectory from horny youths to confident men: Limbo, Panto’s firecracker libido matured into Two Dancers’ debonair lotharios, who had their hearts broken on Smother. After the adult intimacies of Present Tense, Boy King feels like a middle-aged man buying a motorbike to prove that he’s still virile, grunting lustily and making “ooh matron” double entendres about sex and commerce. Is “Big Cat” a criticism of untouchable corrupt businessmen like Donald Trump and Philip Green, or an admission of dominant sexual tendencies? (“Won’t be your house cat, are you okay with that?”) Is “Get My Bang” about rampant Black Friday consumerism or getting your kicks at any cost? Either way, the orgiastic gasping and hammy outrage doesn’t constitute “a sense of threat,” as Thorpe has described it, but a turn-off. The gimmickery only magnifies their palpable fear of becoming repetitive or predictable.
Now and then, Wild Beasts break beyond the surface to offer a few sharper observations. “Now I’m all fucked up and I can’t stand up so I better suck it up like a tough guy would,” Thorpe oozes on “Tough Guy,” illuminating the toxic expectations of machismo: “the old path to a new hell.” That song references Steinbeck’s observation that “all of men’s vices are a shortcut to love,” a predicament that traps Fleming on “Ponytail,” where he pleads for love in a moment of lust. It’s Boy King’s best song: a pitch-shifted, barely decipherable cry of “hold me by my, hold me by my” hovers like a mosquito whine; a ringing cash register punctuates the transactional nature of the experience; Fleming’s baritone steers its soft, perilous desperation. That forlorn quality also animates “2BU,” Fleming racing an arpeggiated synth as he warns a girl, “When I come calling, let’s hope that I don’t find you first.” Even if the lyrics are underwhelming, the band and Congleton match the moods well—the restraint of “Big Cat” and “Get My Bang” reinforces the trap of desire that imprisons them, and “Tough Guy” struts convincingly—though too many of the songs pound the same phrase into oblivion and rely on suspense rather than hooky payoffs.
Boy King is by no means a disaster, but it is a disappointment. It’s hard to think of a guitar band better at singing about sex than Wild Beasts were on their first four albums—sex as caper, as competition, lust, ritual, sadness, redemption. For every extreme, a nuanced undercurrent: the sweetly silly dance moves that accompanied the sincerity of “A Simple Beautiful Truth;” the sense of being so overpowered by romance that comparing your love to Shelley and Frankenstein seems perfectly logical. Here, they’ve inhabited their concept so fully that it disappears and becomes a single dimension. Their version of oversexed, rutting sleaze is better than a lot of bands who pull that trick—and it’s refreshing to hear men singing about being wrong without resorting to Drake-ian self-effacement—but that doesn’t stop the record from sounding thin. Perhaps it works on a meta level: On Boy King, Wild Beasts’ attempt to sing about being consumed by desire consumes them in turn.
