Label: Inside Job / MNRK UK
Released: 22nd April 2022
Rating: ★★★★
Life changes: not just in those big, post-pandemic seismic shifts so many of us have experienced, but those long-seeded, more personal developments that have been coming a long time regardless. The Cold Years that greet us on ‘Goodbye To Misery’ certainly find themselves in new territory. Frontman Ross Gordon’s relocation from Aberdeen to the bright lights of Glasgow comes with a mental shift. As he puts it himself, “I’m not self-destructive or miserable anymore”.
That’s quite the thing to promise coming out of such a period of isolation and struggle, but ‘Goodbye To Misery’ does what it promises. A bigger, more ambitious Cold Years are aiming for something massive, simply because they can. But just because they’re a band more centred in themselves doesn’t mean they’ve not got things to be angry about: this time, they’re turning their guns outwards, fighting the good fight to the bitter end.
With the stadium bravado of Green Day and the grit and gravel of endless working-class punks before them, ‘Britain Is Ded’ kicks back against the fetid establishment. ‘Headstone’ is late-90s college radio pop-punk at its finest, while closer ‘Control’ tugs back hard on society’s puppet strings, refusing to be forced to dance to anyone else’s tune. That’s the spirit that runs through Cold Years – defiant, deliberate and ready to take direct action; nobody’s gonna keep them down.
