The influence of Queens Of The Stone Age’s 2017 Villains album is to the fore as a fuzz-drenched riff threatens to burrow its way into our frontal lobe, Ben Thatcher’s drums honed to a flattened throb beneath a swaggering solo from Kerr that has Homme’s desert-rock fingerprints all over it. The Simmering Boilermaker was the first track the band recorded, at sessions in California with former touring buddy and mentor Josh Homme.
“Our second album was a careful step forwards, whereas this one is a very confident and joyous leap forwards,” Kerr recently told NME. Typhoons, a technicolour major-label pop monster that sees the duo fully indulge their love of disco and funk, at times stretching out into EDM territory, is a celebration of that new-found sobriety.
With two UK No 1 albums and two million sales under Royal Blood’s belt, Kerr reached an epiphany in Las Vegas, downing his final espresso martini and vowing to give up alcohol and drugs for good. Behind the scenes, the wanton excess that had accompanied the band’s vertiginous rise was threatening burnout. A less memorable second album, How Did We Get So Dark, raised suggestions that all wasn’t well in Kerr’s personal life, its autobiographical lyrics signifying troubled times while a penchant for more groove-oriented sounds began to emerge. Royal Blood were unique – an instantly gargantuan guitar band without a guitarist, Mike Kerr’s closely guarded, split-amp, pitch-shifting bass setup at the heart of an impossibly massive noise. READ MORE: Meet Silver Synthetic, the sun-drenched psych-rockers making waves on Jack White’s record label.Their self-titled debut album exploded seemingly out of nowhere, the taut, incendiary riffing on songs such as Out Of The Black, Figure It Out and Little Monster offering pulse-quickening escapism that was embraced hungrily by a tired music industry. Seven years ago, the momentum behind Brighton two-piece Royal Blood seemed irresistible.
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