Declan McKenna burst onto the UK indie scene back in the mid 2010s after winning the 2015 Glastonbury's Emerging Talent competition at the age of just 16, releasing his debut record, What Do You Think Of The Car? a couple of years later in 2017. That record was a perfectly fine, if run of the mill, indie rock album tinged with some existential and political writing that showed some promise (the big single Brazil is genuinely a great indie rock song).
I only began to pay more attention to McKenna last year when he released the non-album single, British Bombs; a protest song about the war in Yemen that sounds straight out of The Clash's London Calling. It's a really great song. That song was followed up by the lead single for this album, Beautiful Faces. The song is the stomping mix of indie rock and glam with a souring otherworldly chorus. The noisy, rough guitar tones; thunderous drumming and whining synths create this raucous and alien atmosphere for Declan's existential vocals to glide over. It's a toss up between these two tracks as to which is the best song McKenna has written but it's one of them for sure.
The mash up of indie rock and glam on Beautiful Faces is carried throughout the whole of Zeros, in a generally entertaining, if messy and disjointed, way. The opener, You Better Believe!!!, starts as a jovial indie rock song with a breezy guitar melody before gaining more and more swagger as the track progresses. The existentialism seeps in as McKenna howls "We're gonna get ourselves killed!" on the bridge. It's such a feel good opener to the record and seems ready made for festival stages. Daniel, You're Still a Child has chunky, new wave groove to it that combines with the glam elements nicely. Declan uses the character of Daniel, who crops up on various points of the album, to voice the themes of teenage nihilism and existential dread; and how you've just got to enjoy yourself at a personal level, despite how terrible the world you're growing up into might seem.
The album is at its weakest when its at its most derivative.The tracks Be an Astronaut and The Key to Life on Earth are so obvious Bowie pastiches. They aren't bad songs but they feel like pale imitations of Bowie's sound and style. Be an Astronaut is a dramatic piano led song akin to the likes of Space Odyssey and Life On Mars, but is no where near as wondrous and whimsical as those classics, or as catchy. The Key to Life on Earth opens with these wobbly synths that sound exactly like the ones on Ashes to Ashes. It's distractingly similar, and the lyrics are also some of the weakest on the record. Declan plays up the teenage drama a bit too much, and is really trying to sell things like not liking school and teen fashion trends as deep, and it doesn't work for me really.
The back half of the record consists of messy but intriguing tracks, that introduce so many ideas and elements that they never quite settle into knowing what are. The track Emily for instance, starts as this twangy folk song, but from the second verse turns into a 'bleepy-bloopy' synth tune, before an admittedly killer guitar solo closes out the song. The song just doesn't know what it is. It is the most egregious example of this lack of cohesion, but it does permeate into other tracks on the second half. They all have good qualities to them (Rapture has super glam-y falsetto hook; and the simple, minimal verses of Sagittarius A* are a nice change of pace), but they don't quite come together into a particularly memorable whole. Twice Your Size is the only song from the second half that feels like a focused, complete experience, and it's one of the better tracks on the album. The very 70's synth tones and jangly guitar combine with McKenna's yelpy vocals to make something slightly psychedelic and woozy, climaxing to a wall of sound at the end of the song.
Zeros feels like the kind of transitional album for an artist still in development (hes only 21), but an ambitious and interesting one, even if it doesn't always hit the mark. McKenna's personality is also strong enough to carry the album when it's ideas don't quite land, meaning it never drags. It's solid but only touches upon something greater in a couple of places.
Top Tracks: You Better Believe!!!, Beautiful Faces, Daniel, You're Still A Child, Twice Your Size
6/10
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