Placebo – Release there stunning new album " Never Let Me Go"

Editor Katie Watkins 25/03/22

Rock band Placebo are back with a stunning new album titled " Never Let Me Go. 

This is the bands first release in 9 years and what an album it is.

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that Placebo are ‘underrated’. Yes, certainly, the London band's flexible, nuanced, genre-straddling and sometimes unsettlingly sexual music does tend to be overlooked by the tastemakers of popular opinion whose bylines appear in the more ‘respectable’ areas of the mainstream  music press. 

Placebo have achieved and maintained a level of success of which literally hundreds of ostensibly similar bands, who have all fallen and our now long forgotten, would give their souls to call their own. 

‘Never Let Me Go’, the British icons’ eighth album and is every bit the departure that the frontman suggests, while also being thoroughly listenable and retaining enough of the band’s rock-noir DNA to feel like a long-awaited homecoming. 

The tone is set by the warped opener ‘Forever Chemicals’, a Depeche–Mode-meets-Nine-Inch-Nails clash of cyber-punk, electronica and scuzzy rock that sees Molko deliver more of his fabulous nihilism: “It’s all good when nothing matters / It’s all good when no one cares”.

The Lead single “Beautiful James” follows, a pulsing melodic anthem that champions the diversity Placebo have emblemised since “Nancy Boy” stood up to the laddish culture of Nineties Britpop. Elsewhere, “Happy Birthday in the Sky” imparts a degree of abstraction and introspection but retains moments of encompassing noise, with a chorus to explode listening devices in moody fashion. After a fairly grunge-led opening salvo, the album takes some creative detours: “The Prodigal” employs strings, which adds a welcoming change of texture, and “Sad White Reggae” injects funk rhythms before erupting into a rocking bridge section. Meanwhile, “Try Better Next Time” couples an upbeat dynamic with pointed lyrics contemplating the uneasy global environmental situation.

This album is available to purchase from all good music retail outlets and can be downloaded and streamed from good download and streaming site.