In today’s music industry, there’s no time to be polite. With the public’s ever-reducing attention span, you need to make a point, make it quick, and then move on to the next thing. Don’t stick to the middle ground because it’s easy – make yourself heard by splitting opinion. That’s exactly what Liverpudlian alt-rock-slash-genre-defying quartet Courting have done, and it’s got them to their meteoric third album, ‘Lust for Life; Or How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story’ (hereafter known as ‘Lust for Life’ – we’re on the clock here, people).
Releasing three albums and an EP in three years is no mean feat, especially when they sound as different as Courting’s back catalogue. From the glitchy, electronica-based, ironically named debut album’ Guitar Music’, to the jangling pop-rock melodies of 2024 crowd-splitter ‘New Last Name’, lead singer Sean Murphy-O’Neill has never been one for mediocrity.
“I’d rather have an album that gets 10s and 1s rather than a whole load of 7s and 8s,” he reveals. “I just think it means what you’ve made is more interesting. There are loads of bands out there who churn out albums that all get 6.8 or 7.1 out of 10, but they’re instantly forgettable. I don’t wanna write songs that are gonna be forgotten about a month after they’re released.”
“I like being a band that people love and hate,” he proudly continues. “I have no ownership of whether people like what we do or not, so I’d rather be divisive than toe the line of what’s deemed ‘ok’ at the sacrifice of my own artistic identity. No good album has ever been made worrying about expectation.”
“The endgame is to make clever music that’s fun”
The sheer difference between ‘Guitar Music’ and ‘New Last Name’, linked by very little other than the band that made them, is what has allowed Courting to continue to innovate and push their own boundaries while also avoiding ‘tricky second album’ syndrome.
“To be honest, I view ‘New Last Name’ as a second debut album because we’d finished it before the first album had even come out. We don’t wait for feedback before we start creating again – we ignore what people think, which mitigates pressure and means we make the album we want to make, not what other people think we should do.”
Out of the ashes of those first two albums comes their magnificent third, ‘Lust for Life’, blending together an opening violin solo, a deep house anthem, pop-rock vocoder moments, and blistering indie-rock anthems to create a record that sonically bursts at the seams, but keeps enough stitches in place to hold together as a cohesive unit.
For some bands, the drawing together of all these disparate threads might earn them the title of ‘experimental’. For Sean, though, this wide-ranging approach is just par for the course.
“I think you can only call something experimental within the bounds of a career. The melodic, pop-y stuff on ‘New Last Name’ was more of a risk than what we’re doing here. People give bands kudos for not following rigid structures or whatever, but actually, it’s more impressive for bands to not be afraid of showing pop influences.”
“On ‘New Last Name’, we played with pop-punk and synth-pop, but with sincerity, because it’s what we listened to growing up. A lot of bands now would only do that at the highest level of irony, trying to show off that they’re clever, but it removes the whole point; who wants to feel clever listening to Fall Out Boy?”
That’s not to say that there isn’t depth to what Courting are doing, with ‘Lust for Life’ being chock full of structural and logistical ideas that take risks and allow the band to evolve much like the titans they grew up listening to. Nonetheless, the whole purpose of the band is to create music that is fun both to play and to listen to, meddling with tempo, instrumentation, and melodic similarity to create an album you can’t help but listen to on repeat.
“The endgame is to make clever music that’s fun,” Sean states. “I never want to be playing a show where the crowd’s talking amongst themselves going, ‘Hmm, yes, I see what they did there; that’s a clever idea’. Interesting music can still be enjoyable; when we were writing ‘Pause At You’, we were really inspired by Berlin-era Bowie, just making a 70s dance-punk tune that people can bounce around to that’s still got cool ideas.”
In many ways, the objective of the album was to take frowned-upon methods and rejuvenate them, breathing life into overused trash-pop and classic rock clichés in a way that made them cool, most clearly represented by the two-part album title.
“Honestly, I think all of our album titles come to me in a dream,” Sean smirks, “but as soon as I thought of it, I knew it had to be the name. The ‘Lust for Life’ part is one of the oldest clichés in rock music, but it’s just a fantastic title, then we wanted to deviate away from that with the experimental, stupidly long second half.”
This idea is distilled most clearly in the song ‘Lust for Life’, a three-part journey that travels from ‘A Brief Inquiry…’-era The 1975 synth-pop into 70s folk-rock, via a brief foray into arena rock through huge reverb guitars and mind-mashing drumlines.
“That song was totally inspired by clichés and taking pleasure from music,” Sean recalls. “It’s been so long since we were able to do a gratuitous sax solo. Stuff like that is so viscerally enjoyable and fun in a physical way; if you don’t like it, you’re a snob!”
He continues: “We used really trashy elements that are obviously fun and married them with pretentious stuff. Autotune, for example, is viewed as this lowbrow thing. It can be techy and stupid, but when it’s used right, it can be artistic and powerful.”
“It’s been so long since we were able to do a gratuitous sax solo”
Possibly without even trying, Sean underlines an unspoken hypocrisy within the music industry. While the business values creativity and bending the accepted rules of songwriting, it still needs to sell a product, often trying to tie acts down into a certain box or genre identity. Courting, however, bridge this gap. By using commercial elements as a way to push the envelope, they help to continuously move the broader genres of indie rock and alt-pop in interesting directions.
They also manage to highlight unfair standards that rock bands have to meet in order to be considered worthy of listeners. Producing three albums in as many years, keeping their album to below half an hour in total, and referencing overtly pop-centric influences are celebrated in certain parts of the industry – but not for rock bands.
“We’re a proper band, in the old sense of the word,” Sean reveals. “The Beatles were producing two albums a year so that they could keep it interesting and fresh – that’s what we’re doing too.
“I think it’s so unfair the way that rock bands are treated for having short albums. If an electronic act or pop star makes an album that’s 20 or 25 minutes, nobody’s arsed, but the minute a rock band does that, it’s not allowed.
“In the era of streaming, I’d rather make an album that’s in-and-out, that smacks you in the face then goes away. There’s no point making a long album that people won’t get through; I want to cut the excess and make multiple albums that exist in different atmospheres.”
This approach makes its way into the band’s album production, focusing on a smaller number of songs that have the potential to go the distance, instead of writing hundreds of songs that never see the light of day.
“We don’t whittle down songs – we write eight songs and make them good. It’s a well-rounded use of our time, there’s no point writing 90 songs that you don’t believe in. The best art comes from initiative; even if you make a dud, you know you meant to do it. What we make is 100% genuine; we’re not changing to fit expectations.”
This results in not only wholly authentic work but also the ability to write and record quickly, filtering the energy and electricity in the room back into the music that the band ultimately produces.
“Recording this album probably took about 20 days; it was about three days per song. We have a lot of happy accidents, we’re not bothered about having the exact right pedal for a certain part or whatever, we get in, we get it done, we move on. We know what we want; we’ve got it sussed, man.”
You can never know everything, though, with the band deliberately challenging themselves to layer in ideas that subvert people’s preconceived thoughts about what the band is going to do next. It would be too easy otherwise, right?
“The album is horizontally symmetrical – the songs after ‘Namcy’ mirror certain elements or share ideas that keep the album cyclical, which is another one of those rock music clichés that I love. It’s like a puzzle, we try to write by re-sampling a section and modulating it so you don’t realise at first, or by recording using an instrument you don’t know how to play – it takes the songs to more interesting places.”
The shared melody of ‘INTRO’ and closing track ‘Likely Place for Them to Be’, the lyrical satire of ‘Namcy’ and ‘Eleven Sent (This Time)’, or the simple existence of dance-rock bangers ‘After You’ and ‘Pause At You’ evidence a band perfecting their skills as they go, yet somehow managing to nail it every time. ‘New Last Name’ might have been divisive, but ‘Lust for Life’ feels like a grand unifier.
Where does a band that is constantly evolving go next, then?
“I think the first album was throwing everything at the wall, whereas album two was a closer study of melody. This one feels like we’ve expanded on both of those fronts; it’s a melting pot of what we liked as kids and the stuff we wanna push forward.
“Thinking back to Fall Out Boy – they make fun music, but they’re still really smart and daring. They take risks. They had Jay-Z introduce one of their albums [‘Infinity on High’]. Who’s the next arena-rock band that’s gonna take a risk like that? I think it should be us. We should be headlining Glastonbury – why not?”
Whatever Courting decide to do next, there’s little doubt that they’ll do it anything other than boldly. If life feels as good as Courting sound, then it’s understandable why you’d lust after it. ■
Taken from the April 2025 issue of Dork. Courting’s album ‘Lust for Life; Or How To Thread The Needle And Come Out The Other Side To Tell The Story’ is out 14th March.
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