Geordie rockers Maximo Park threw caution to the wind with their last album Risk To Exist, an angry, acerbic record that took aim at Brexit and Trumpism and marked a significant lyrical shift from frontman Paul Smith. The album was accompanied by a zine that included a contribution from political commentator Owen Jones, and essays from Smith. For fans and critics alike, it was a dramatic transformation from the band that burst onto the scene in the mid-2000s with the swaggering, indie dance pomp of Graffiti and their debut album A Certain Trigger.

Now, twenty years since the band’s foundation, it’s those two records – their debut and 2017’s Risk To Exist – that arguably remain the band’s defining outputs. With their new album Nature Always Wins landing this week, what kind of Maximo Park have we got in store this time around?

The album’s lead single All Of Me offered some clues. With it’s synths, big drums and heartfelt lyrics (“I never thought that I was reckless / Now I know that I was lost until you came along”) it is perhaps reflective of some of the changes that have happened to the band over the last few years, from the departure of keyboardist and founding member Lukas Wooller to Smith becoming a father for the first time. But if that sounds like Nature Always Wins is the sound of a band getting old and mellowing out, that’s not the case.

Opening track Partly Of My Making is a pulsating, twisting riff-heavy monster of a track, while Placeholder, with its Smiths-esque sensibilities, is up there with the best three-minute indie pop songs Maximo Park have ever done. And the political edge that the band adopted with Risk To Exist remains in places, particularly when Smith turns his attention to the Grenfell tragedy on Why Must A Building Burn? (“Why must a building burn / Before a lesson is learned?”), while the energy of I Don’t Know What I’m Doing is a joy. 

Nature Always Wins is an album that proves, two decades on, Maximo Park are still alive and kicking, and more than that, they’ve widened their horizons without losing any of what made them so much fun in the first place.

Nature Always Wins tracklist:

1. Partly Of My Making
2. Versions Of You
3. Baby, Sleep
4. Placeholder
5. All Of Me
6. Ardour
7. Meeting Up
8. Why Must A Building Burn?
9. I Don’t Know What I’m Doing
10. The Acid Remark
11. Feelings I’m Supposed To Feel
12. Child Of The Flatlands

Watch the official video for All Of Me here.

Author: Joe Sharratt

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