Courting's Lust for Life delivers bold, semi-cryptic post-punk wit on a grand scale

This boundary between pretension and bare bones antics belies the concision of third album Lust for Life. Sought as counterpoint to the vast scope of last year's New Last Name, lead vocalist Sean Murphy-O'Neill has acknowledged the record’s ubiquitous title as being “as much Iggy Pop as it is Lana Del Rey” in terms of influence – a simple yet effective pitch to the band’s claim to abandoning the playbook of expectation.

This is backed by the goods to some margin. After an outlier orchestral intro, “Stealth Rollback” flutters into being, verging between electro-clash and frenzied strings, almost appearing a mission statement for the band’s claim to singularity in its pure diametrical nature. The album’s alternative title, in fact, riffs on the ostentatious - bearing more than a little comparison to the 1975’s predilection for manifesto-like intentions. Lust For Life’s identity is unfixed and fluid from the outset, the initial rackety guitar blasts fanning "Pause At You" strike with Room on Fire-era Strokes grit, the noughties heyday of indie nodded to yet outweighed by post-genre phenomena. Terse vocals saunters against the shadow of "Namcy" in a haze of late-90s stateside alt-rock ephemera, whilst the breeziness of “Eleven Sent (This Time)” basks in an incongruous mashup of twee sax with pop-punk vocal overtones.

Elsewhere, subtle synth squiggles and sax straddle the two-part title-track, Lou Reed-esque tones drolly adorning the latter segment, slinking through the humdrum reality of the day and age: “I got a job at the good end factory / I retired in a week / It was minimum wage, and the pension didn’t pay out / Half what it should’ve been”.

Murphy O’Neill pays such lip service to social commentary but his focus lies primarily on arcane references that in many cases will evade detection. Therein lies the animas of Courting’s positioning: the band duly set their deadpan sights on a collection of styles and themes in an eagerness to hold up a mirror to the associated pretensions. Albeit diverging in duration from its predecessors at a mere eight-tracks, Lust for Life remains sufficient in scale to carry such a taste for semi-encrypted post-punk wisecracks.