When Confidence Man first appeared in 2018 with their debut ‘Music For Confident People’, they felt like an in-joke everyone could join in with: all dayglo electroclash, deadpan lyrics and enjoyably wonky live shows featuring homespun choreography. Their second album, 2022’s ‘TILT’, saw frontwoman Janet Planet and her shirt-averse foil Sugar Bones venture further into dance music. Now, in the slipstream of recent club-facing collabs with the likes of Daniel Avery and DJ Seinfeld, plus a prestigious Fabric Presents mix, their euphoric third album always has one swivel-eye on the afterparty.
‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ is both a reference to the nocturnal hour at which they’d write music while wasted and a nod to The KLF’s classic banger ‘3 a.m. Eternal’. Cannibalising the acid house, trance and breakbeat sounds of the ‘90s, ConMan couldn’t evoke an illicit rave from that period more lovingly without being arrested under the 1994 Criminal Justice Act. Sonic touchstones here include Orbital, Underworld and The Prodigy. You can almost smell the Vicks VapoRub wafting from the speakers during the turbocharged ‘Real Move Touch’, which features reggae MC and Gorillaz collaborator Sweetie Irie.
Inspired by their relocation from Brisbane to Dalston and subsequent exploration of London nightlife, they give their new hometown a shout-out on opening track ‘Who Knows What You’ll Find?’. Over French Touch-style filter house, Planet sings “Meet me on the corner of Mare Street and Ridley Road”, like the world’s worst sat-nav, since this intersection doesn’t actually exist.
Still, it adds to ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’’s blurry, oblivion-chasing spirit – which is so relentlessly in thrall to riding the crest of hedonism that it makes Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ summer seem like Dry January. Marrying bubblegum hooks to acid house, the maximalist ‘Control’ sounds like The Prodigy’s Keith Flint doing a key on the Vengabus, while the accurately titled ‘Breakbeat’ contains the lyric “I got a pill in my pocket and I really wanna drop it but I’m not going to pop it ‘til I hear a breakbeat” and boasts a blissed-out Balearic breakdown.
The grinding ‘Sicko’, meanwhile, sounds like it could have been dropped as a Paul Oakenfold remix at The Haçienda, with Bones’ phantasmagorical vocals channelling the woozy claustrophobia of overindulgence. Elsewhere, Planet unleashes her inner Candi Staton-style house diva on the transcendent ‘’Wrong Idea’, while ‘So Tru’ revisits turn-of-the-millennium UK 2-step.
Crucially, it’s a testament to the songwriting smarts of Confidence Man – whose lineup is completed by veiled band members Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie – that ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’ never sounds like an exercise in pastiche. Actually, it perfectly chimes with this post-‘Brat’ era of reckless abandonment recession pop. Already the most fun live band around, you always feel that Confidence Man are on the precipice of becoming the kind of proper crossover pop stars that Bowen Yang might impersonate on Saturday Night Live. ‘3AM (LA LA LA)’, their most assured collection yet, proves they definitely have the tunes to match their outsized personas.
Details
- Release date: October 18, 2024
- Record label: Chaos/Polydor