Friendly Fries
Paris

Ghetto-dwelling, dank-smelling, P’fork-reading pop naysayers beware: you are going to hate this. It doesn’t reinvent anything. It doesn’t challenge anyone. It won’t win you any indie point wars, for they have already been on Channel 4, the first unsigned band in fact to be featured on Transmission. This song will refuse to be a cult classic and much like ‘Oh My God’, ‘Fake Tales of San Francisco’ and ‘Darts of Pleasure’ it’ll haunt you in steakhouses, office parties and within festival fences for years to come. You’ll find the lyrics overly simplistic and ever so saccharine, the hugely sentimental story of escapist boyhood romance will frustrate you but that’s fine because you’ve got documentaries about bands no-one’s ever heard of to watch and limited-edition vinyl to carefully brush the dust off of. You’ll deal with it, but it won’t give you the dumb smile I can’t currently wipe off.

Pop predictors, ready? Hey ho! Let’s go… “One day, we’re gonna live, in Paris, I promise, I’m on it!” And so begins the whirl of one of the most exciting singles of the year. It’s a post-p’funk dreamscape of slithering shoegaze guitars and cowbells. These are St. Albans kids who’ve swallowed the party pills of LCD, embraced the geeky-lilt of Hot Chip and tied it together with some won’t-leave-you-for-weeks sweaty hooks as instantly infectious as the clap, The Kooks or Kylie. All of which is conjured together as both an open invitation to dance and an assault upon your neurons.

It’s not genius, nor magic, but this is how you take what you know and love and write a pop song that’s as much for white van man as the cute girl in the second row barely wearing her Sonic Youth t-shirt. However, what’s most worrying about these fresh-faced kids is that they have a ton of songs like ‘Paris’, many of which will be bothering you and the charts for much of next year.

_“…And every night, the city liiiights, they’ll be out for us, they’ll be out for us!

And every night, we’ll watch the stars, they’ll be out for us, they’ll be out for us!”_

However, don’t doubt me when this isn’t a instantly certifiable hit; the modern pop paradigm is all about timing and there’s something undoubtedly timely dropping this just as everyone is preparing their Tips For Next Year lists, but having seen carcasses thrown around to this at Latitude earlier this year, it’s clearly a case of doing one of those heavily marketed, radio-playlist plying, major label re-releases the week after Glastonbury and Friendly Fires becoming the band of the summer. Now that I can predict; nay, I promise.

“This time next year, we’ll be forevermore…”

Read more reviews of this week's singles here