On Bush's last album, 2022’s The Art Of Survival, frontman Gavin Rossdale turned his pen towards outside forces, with songs influenced by politically charged topics ranging from reproductive rights to climate change. I Beat Loneliness is a much more inward-looking album.
Some of the titles – Everyone Is Broken, Love Me Till The Pain Fades – read like they’ve been cribbed from a grunge/emo crossover handbook. But there’s an importance to being earnest, and Gavin imbues the songs with emotion and a little more nuance than the titles suggest.
Musically, it presents as anyone who’s followed the band’s latter-day career might expect, following in the footsteps of The Art Of Survival and 2020’s The Kingdom. There are still streaks of the pop-rock and electronica that accompanied the band’s original reformation, but they’re bolstered by the big grunge riffs and thrusting dynamism of their early days.
Opener Scars is a case in point, riding in on a pulsing electronic beat before bursting into a pneumatic riff and a big singalong chorus. The title track treads similar ground, with churning guitars, melodic swells and more soul-searching lyrics. The album is a little lopsided, with the big rock beasts loaded towards the front.
The gears change just after halfway through, with We Are Of This Earth, a wonderfully atmospheric hippified jam complete with jangling guitars and groovy percussion. Everyone Is Broken is a dramatic ballad, balancing fragility and bombast in a way that you can already picture blowing the roof off auditoria in teary mass sing-alongs.
Bush do both sides of the equation equally well, and I Beat Loneliness is never less than a well-constructed slab of modern hard rock with a strong melodic sensibility and just enough nostalgic glances to the past. It’s an amalgam of the band’s different eras that will delight fans without causing too many jaws to drop.
I Beat Loneliness is out now via Ear Music. Bush are on tour with Shinedown in the US now, and support Volbeat in Europe and the UK later this year. For the full list of dates, visit their official website.
