Album Review: The Smith Street Band - Sunshine & Technology

They've shed the 'Wil Wagner And' and The Smith Street Band's cohesion as a songwriting unit has come along in leaps and bounds. Where breakout debut, No One Gets Lost Anymore, held indelible traces of the singer/songwriter in their fleshed-out versions of the songs, on Sunshine & Technology, the songs achieve a new understanding and utilisation of structure and balance, the three-guitar attack wielded with attuned maturity on album stand-outs like the just plain-old-ridiculously-good I Can't Feel My Face and What's Changed. Young Drunk suggests those earlier days – a ditty-ish unadorned acoustic number – before swelling into the kind of anthemic ode to misfits that litter the album.

From frontman Wil Wagner, a harried and hurried verbal assault, a frantic and honest spilling of guts, airing of grievances and justification of juvenility is presented in a stream of consciousness delivery that could be jarring were it not so genuine, and well-balanced with the reckless singalong moments that pepper the likes of Why I Can't Draw and I Can't Feel My Face.

They grabbed all the right people's attention with their debut, and thankfully seemed to give zero fucks (there is a song called Tom Busby – both the song and the man rule), instead simply stepping up their own game, working their arses off live (no doubt a contributing factor to the uniform quality of these ten tracks) and taking their raucous and infectious, beautifully scrappy folk punk to new heights that not even the hype could have predicted.