Album Review: Wire - Wire

English post-punk luminaries, Wire, have avoided the burgeoning and lucrative reformation circuit by rarely having stopped playing during a career that spans well over three decades.

The quartet’s eponymous album is their 14 full-length and sees them pushing to stay relevant. Almost as cringeworthy as adult males singing about high school, is generation X showing disdain for the world of social media, but Wire get away with it by coming across as a sinister cousin of Mi-Sex during opener, Blogging.

Burning Bridges is as shiny a piece of pop as you would be likely to hear from Wire, with some tidy guitar interplay, and In Manchester has a hook that could take out an eye. While things are pretty accessible by Wire’s standards for this outing, there is still the obtuse and discordant Harpooned to keep long term fans engaged.

Wire maintain their desire to push the boundaries and experiment whilst still being guided by the pop melodies of Colin Newman. Rarely do they get it wrong.

Originally published in X-Press Magazine