Victoria Hesketh has either brilliant or awful timing. Recall her 2009 debut: Little Boots had the fortune, it seemed at the time, to emerge solo alongside about six other new electropop acts, all varying combinations of blonde, British, and boshing, with dossiers full of tie-ins, dollops of irony, and a tendency to deliver suspiciously similar talking points about how their dance music differed from the other dance music conquering the Top 40 in their stead. Of those, Lady Gaga went supernova, La Roux has spent three years writing the follow-up to its debut, the "is-it-pop-or-is-it-not?" debate was foisted onto a new group of singers, and all went quiet for Little Boots. Yet her shiny pop debut was ahead of the curve in a way, helmed in part by Greg Kurstin, four years before he became the go-to producer for shiny pop albums. If it’s instinct, it’s the same instinct that steered her ever closer since toward 90s-inspired house, two early singles of which (“Shake” and “Every Night I Say a Prayer”) heralded her second album, Nocturnes-- an album that’s come out just as Disclosure, Rudimental, and seemingly one-third of the British commonwealth have emerged and begun to score uninterrupted No. 1 hits with that very sound.
The major difference, obviously, is that the hype around Little Boots has now completely dissipated-- as have at least some of Little Boots’ industry ties; Nocturnes is out under her own On Repeat label. It’s not a bad thing, exactly; where before Hesketh was all but set up for failure even if she did manage the crossover, she’s now able to settle into a more attainable level of expectations. Hands’ catalog of pop sub-styles is gone, and where that record forced her to sing like about six separate divas, Nocturnes finds her settling on one that aspires to the distance of Saint Etienne's Sarah Cracknell or Sophie Ellis-Bextor. She’s not quite there, and when her approach doesn’t work, it really doesn’t-- as on “Confusion”, which juggles lasers, cowbell, house piano, vocal percussion, and a small packet of stock sounds until its outro, “never lie to me again” is banally repeated, like a petulant lover’s spat. “Every Night” has a cavernous chorus that Hesketh isn’t enough of a belter to fill.
Nocturnes is a big improvement over Hands, though, where even the biggest singles' hooks were made of saccharine, not sugar. Hesketh credits the change to her time spent DJing, but while she’s bound to have been immersed in the U.K. dance scene’s burgeoning 90s revival, her collaborators are of a different stripe. DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy takes over for Kurstin, but most of Hesketh’s writers on Nocturnes (Hercules and Love Affair’s Andy Butler, Bomb the Bass’ Pascal Gabriel, Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford) are studio veterans.
Little Boots’ subject matter hasn't changed at all, however. Hesketh is still fond of overly pat metaphor, usually involving her own music; standing in for Hands’ “Tune Into My Heart” and “Stuck on Repeat” are “Crescendo”, which builds appropriately enough until you realize it’s supposed to be about a fight somehow, and “Broken Record”, sinuous like a fever dream until you realize lines like “thought you were out of mind, instead you’re stuck on repeat” are probably also about Little Boots’ career. (Or, for that matter, “Stuck on Repeat”, which is either horribly lazy or horribly meta and plausibly deniable either way.)
When the metaphors don’t falter, other things do: “Strangers” comes off as an offcut from Kylie Minogue’s Aphrodite, too tired even for a victory lap album. “All for You” is sleepier still. But a good deal of these tracks work just fine: the Dido-at-dusk escape fantasy “Motorway”; “Satellite”, which whirls and sparkles as undeniably as anything in producer Ariel Rechtshaid's back catalogue; or the Ford-penned former lead single “Shake”, which throbs, throbs some more, and needs do nothing else. It all adds up to a sort of twisted proof of Hands’ big talking point: maybe you’re a better hitmaker when you’re not so self-conscious about it.
