For anyone else that grew up in the noughties, a warning: this next sentence will make you feel really old. American rockers We Are Scientists have been around now for TWENTY years. OK, they’ve been through plenty of lineup changes and even experimented with lots of different genres over that time, but the band that gave us the fun and frolics of 2006’s breakthrough hit album With Love and Squalor are now entering their third decade together.

So are they growing old gracefully? New single Fault Lines is our chance to find out, and the first obvious point to make for anyone who might be returning to the band for the first time since their mid-2000s heyday is that the two-man dynamic of guitarist and vocalist Keith Murray and bassist Chris Cain remains, though drumming, both in the studio and live, is now handled by Keith Carne after the departure in 2007 of Michael Tapper.

Fault Lines is the new single from the band’s as-yet-unreleased seventh studio album, which in turn is the follow up to 2018’s Megaplex, an LP which embraced We Are Scientists’ occasional love of electro elements. It’s the follow up single to I Cut My Own Hair, the wonderfully lockdown appropriate (though it was written before the Coronavirus pandemic took hold) title that landed earlier this year.

It’s a big, loud, angry, affair too. Packing a skidding, harsh guitar riff around some pounding drums as Murray sings: “It's unbelievable, negotiating these things / Somehow every little detail seems so key / We can't conceive how we'll eventually perceive / So many things that didn't seem to mean a thing / At the time, at least”. The chorus is huge and fun, with a little flourish of bass that kicks in at just the right moment.

It’s something of a quirk that We Are Scientists have always been so popular in the UK, more so than at home in the USA. They arrived in the UK at the right time, and with this new single, it feels like they’re ready to assimilate once again, if lockdown regulations allow, of course.

Watch the official video for Fault Lines here.

Author: Joe Sharratt

Joe Sharratt is a writer and journalist based in the UK covering music, literature, sport, and travel.