Real Lies: We Will Annihilate Our Enemies review – lad laureate meets euphoric synths
The third album by London electronic duo Real Lies might be the perfect record for our unseasonably warm spring. Beneath its chilly 1990s and 2000s nostalgic exterior, it's actually a profoundly optimistic album, one that suggests love and connection might offer a way out of our angry, disconnected moment. Opening with the sweeping, Knife-esque club track Loverboy – whose spacey synth intro becomes a refrain throughout the album – We Will Annihilate Our Enemies captures the frantic, sometimes depressing, often exciting feeling of life in a big city, where everyone is fighting and partying and working all the time.
Throughout, vocalist Kevin Lee Kharas positions himself as a kind of poet laureate of lad society, delivering his party polemics with an imperious, 2am wisdom: muttering about friendship and youthful hedonism on Wild Sign I Choose You; paying tribute to the endless grind of the city on Loverworld. It's potent, sometimes ridiculous stuff that producer Patrick King makes sound grand and romantic, girding it with wandering synth lines or exhilarating beats that recall Underworld or, on a song like Towards Horses, even Pet Shop Boys. It's a heady, euphoric combination.
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