Aslyums – Alien Human Emotions (Cool Thing Records)

Genre: Rock

Every summer needs its jam. Football’s coming home? Forget it, Aslyums are going to lock that tune up and throw away the keys because they’ve got something much better.

Alien Human Emotions is the follow up to the four-piece’s debut Killer Brain Waves and is produced via their own label Cool Thing Records and it just feels like it could be a perfect beer garden soundtrack.

Taken at face value there perhaps isn’t a lot of bright sunshine coming through the airwaves. Like a lot of artists, Aslyums have poured a certain amount of cathartic energy into their music and this record touches on relationships gone down the pan, bad sex and the whole world going a bit mental.

Press to MECO chat their second album, nuclear destruction and NASA

But the way the melodies swirl and grip and bite and don’t let go is intoxicating in itself. The way the drums roll and roll and roll on When We Wake Up and the hook has a slight Feeder-from-back-in-the-day vibe to it papers over that darkness and presents it with a burst of effervescent light.

That glorious throwback sound is like a warm undercurrent throughout the whole album, and it bursts through the seams on Napalm Bubblegum – a raucous tune that packs a high energy punk spirit into a cannon and fires it out at high speed.

Alien Human Emotions is rounded out with a few morbid bangers. Graveyard Tourism is a strangely addictive tune about, well, graveyard tourism while Sexual Automation takes the topic of robots and modern sex life to their grizzly, metallic end.

In a summer that’s been gripped by a thousand Twitter videos and the dramatic rebirth of a song that’s 12 years old, Aslyums are here to reclaim the sun, the good vibes and the beer garden. You’d be mad not to join in.

RUSHONROCK RATED: 8/10 You’d be mad not to