Listen: The Anthem of Summer 2011 - 'Hawaiian Air' by Friendly Fires

Just a hunch but DiS reckons this song will be on the closing credits of this year's Glastonbury coverage, and on the closing credits of the FA Cup Final, and on the closing credits of Reading festival and probably, at some point, on Top Gear, Channel4 News, etc... and will undeniably feature on Radio1 about once an hour for the next four months, and it isn't unlikely that it'll be throbbing away in the background at school discos and during a terrible scene in The Only Way is Essex and/or Geordie Shore (this actually exists!).

On hearing it for the first time, in my track-by-track first listen piece, I attempted to describe this track as sounding like:

A gigantic single... if radio can play a racing tribal beat with whizzing whooshingness. Noticed a line about "watching a film with a talking dog..." and my brain starts wondering if there's a hidden Beethoven sample sprawling beneath it all.

I've subsequently listened to it on repeat enough times that I've felt the need to remove some plays from my Last.fm and blathered on and on about it on my Twitter. It's called 'Hawaiian Air', it's the second single from St Albans' DFA-gone-samba party-starters Friendly Fires' second album Pala, which is out a week on Monday. The album is glorious but this track, which is apparently the last one they recorded for the album, stands out from the rest of the record and I have no qualms in predicting it to be the anthem of summer 2011 (and probably a bunch of summers to come). It has that fizzy feeling of 'Paris' washed in sunshine and tropical textures, a cheeky rhyme of pounds and ground, and shoegaze-tinged guitars switched to simmer. It's summer in a can, from one of the UK's most exciting bands for many years (in my opinion!) and you can stop reading my words about it and bash play...

As I said, it's taken from their forthcoming Paul Epworth produced album Pala ,which is out on May 16th via XL. The album opens with 'Live Those Days Tonight', which has this awesome borrowed-nostalgia-for-the-unremembered-ravin'-80s video:

And you can hear track two from Pala, 'Blue Cassette' via this widget...