“It’s all pretty pumping,” is Olly Alexander’s accurate assessment of Years & Years’ third album Night Call. It’s the first record the 31-year-old Yorkshire lad has made since the band became a solo project (with Mikey Goldsworthy continuing to perform live with Alexander and Emre Türkmen working on other projects as a producer). Alexander has acknowledged it would have been more conventional for him to go solo under his own name, but he felt he’d invested in the Y&Y brand too personally to relinquish it. His renewed commitment to it is audible.
The chunky latex bass lines and glitter synths of Night Call were inspired by the Eighties synth pop he tuned into while starring in the Channel 4 series It’s a Sin. The 18.9 million viewers of the first major British TV series about the Aids crisis might expect the album to carry some of the show’s heartbreak. But what it actually channels is the neon liberation of those old gay club dancefloors, while celebrating how far the culture has come. Like Dua Lipa’s 2020 album Future Nostalgia, Night Call is stacked with solid tunes that reimagine the Day-Glo decade in winking, pulsating high-definition.
