I’ll deal with it now so we can all proceed with the review safe in the knowledge. I don’t just love the Belair Lip Bombs’ debut album Lush Life: I think it is one of the great rock albums of the 21st century, one of the great Australian albums point blank ever. This makes two things certain. One, I have such an enormous heaping of goodwill for this band that it shatters any hope of me appraising their new record truly objectively. Two, it was always going to take a minor miracle for Again to satisfy my impossibly lofty aspirations.

But lord did they give it a crack. Again is, pleasingly, a different record to Lush Life, sidestepping that album’s effervescent power pop cool for something a little more – if I can be frank – bombastic. To follow the Lip Bombs’ social media interactions in the off-season between records is to notice a curious affinity they have for slightly daggy radio rock – lead singer Maisie Everett runs an Instagram account called @albumsthatilove where she posts idiosyncratic album reviews, and early days had some tremendous things to say about Kings of Leon’s 2004 slammer Aha Shake Heartbreak. In a recent Guardian profile, drummer Daniel Devlin identified “when indie rock was in the charts in the 2000s” as the locus of the band’s collective music taste. We should take them at their word. The band has returned with a big fuck-off heart-on-sleeve rave-up arena rock record that, if anything is good in the world, should catapult these four generationally talented songwriters into the indie stratosphere.

This is music of massive sound and seismic feeling. Not that anyone would ever identify Everett as a pretentious lyricist, but here it is notable how intent she is to get earnest in search of absolute truth. Again is an album about chasing love, as pop albums have been ever since the words rock and roll were first paired together, but it is Everett’s wholehearted commitment to that unglamorous pursuit that makes you believe it is a higher purpose. The record climaxes with two back-to-back singles that seem to document opposite sides of the same infatuation. The freewheeling roots-rocker ‘Back Of My Hand’ slides out of its deliriously happy shout-along chorus into a passage that enunciates the volatility of early love: “When you’re having me on, well I fall more than ever babe / Even when we’re fighting, all I really want is you”. But that delirium curdles into longing just minutes later on the soaring ‘Hey You’: “Motherfucker just say what you mean / watched you play with my heart, is it ever what it seems?” When words fail, Everett’s pining eventually falls into a coo that echoes out into the ether over airborne guitar.

The emotion the Lip Bombs wring out of their songs tends to be thrillingly disproportionate in scale to its substance. Over the Prince-like keyboard and guitar stabs of ‘Cinema’, a habit of meeting someone at the movies becomes an analogy for a eye-floater of a relationship that won’t fade away but evades whenever you approach it. Everett returns to a recurring motif on ‘Another World’ and comes away with a gorgeously banal couplet that camouflages a universe of feeling: “You used to say my name / now you say that I remind you of someone else.” On ‘Smiling’, the most radiant song the Lip Bombs have put to record, Everett remembers one soft brush of the hand being powerful enough to dilate time before vaulting into one of the sweetest lyrics I’ve heard all year: “Baby, I want you to know, I saw you smiling when I said hello”.

It's a simple line, but it’s deceptively unconventional. As far as positive sentiments go, many writers will afford themselves space for joy, for affection, or for desire in addition to every angle of sadness that may be communicated with language. Rarely do you encounter a songwriter comfortable expressing pride. It’s a difficult emotion to evoke without coming across as unrelatable. But Everett is evidently beaming with pride as she delivers that lyric, to the point where you can basically hear the grin on her face through your headphones as it plays. And it points to a sly risk-taking streak on her part that differentiates the Lip Bombs as a band from pretty much any of their compatriots.

Often, Everett displays a playful indifference to the rules of rock songwriting and invokes a kind of hip-hop logic to her lyricism. She occasionally does the MIKE/Earl Sweatshirt thing of choosing an oblique word in an otherwise straightforward phrase for pure mouthfeel (“He’s just a rich cat, subtract the judgement from him”). She also loves a simile. It’s quite endearing, in the sense that “slip into your grasp like a magazine / move into your rhythm like a tambourine” making it onto Again implies that no one in the studio dared interrogate Everett’s lyrical instincts for fear of fucking with the magic at play. I don’t blame them.

Sorry boys – Everett is such a wildly compelling artistic prospect that it’s hard to avoid centring her in the context of this review, but Michael Bradvica, Jimmy Droughton and the aforementioned Devlin do deserve at least some attention as the responsible parties for the band’s residual excellence. If bands who make stadium rock are not always associated with tact or taste, they almost certainly are associated with symbiosis, and it is to the Lip Bombs’ credit that as a four-piece they possess all of the above.

Bradvica’s lead guitar is star-making – album opener ‘Again and Again’ finds him giddily cartwheeling around Droughton and Devlin’s motorik pulse, and the sheer velocity of the interplay shoots the track into orbit. But the Lip Bombs also cede more creative discretion to their rhythm section than many of their contemporaries would be willing. In particular, the 1975-esque highlight ‘If You’ve Got The Time’ anchors itself around Droughton and Devlin’s punk-funk strut to truly wicked effect. If there were ever a song to persuade a purist of the Lip Bombs’ rock bona fides, it surely must be this one: as the final chorus collapses into an oddly Celtic guitar solo, the band knows instinctively what is required of them – space to let Bradvica rip, and a long, luxurious fadeout.

The Lip Bombs’ casual virtuosity has a way of obscuring the fact that they are still a young band who aren’t shy to admit they have a bit of a chip on their shoulder. Again courses with an undercurrent of unease that is sometimes disfigured by its searing riffs and catch-me-if-you-can tempos but never really reconciled. The closest Everett gets to addressing that insecurity directly is on ‘Don’t Let Them Tell You (It’s Fair)’, an instant-classic almost-protest anthem and future festival set closer. “You’ve made it this far, I’ll make you a star / Hold onto my arms and let out all the grief in your heart”. It’s not Britpop, but it’s made of the same spine-tingling, pint-sloshing stuff that Oasis trafficked to the masses in their heyday. And if the feverish reception to the Gallagher boys’ latest Australian shows should convince you of anything, it’s the timeless rock-and-roll truth that when all else fails, a guitar riff sick enough and big enough can keep a bad feeling at bay just a little while longer. The Belair Lip Bombs made good on that promise on Lush Life. And they’re doing it again.

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Sam Gollings

2 November 2025