Label: 300 ENTERTAINMENT
Released: 21st May 2021
Rating: ★★★★★
Calling your album ‘Greatest Hits’ is a bit provocative, to say the least – but this is Waterparks. Kicking up sparks and keeping it loud, it’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from a day-glow trio that defy the forces of boring. But more than that, it’s a record that doesn’t just walk the walk – it sprints it.
Successfully ticking both parts of its title (yes, it’s great, and yes, it’s full of hits), it’d be churlish to suggest it was the arrival of Awsten Knight on rock’s biggest stage – he’s been proving himself as one of the few legitimate icons of the past few years for a while now – but it’s dripping with his raw, unfiltered personality.
Never anything but in your face, it switches from pop-punk to full-on hyper-pop banger at will. Its key moments are iconic from the word go. ‘Numb’ runs at a hundred miles an hour, knocking over the furniture on its way out, while ‘You’d Be Paranoid Too (If Everyone Was Out To Get You)’ checks round every corner. Even last year’s first taster ‘Lowkey As Hell’, while effectively still pop-punk, defies all the lazy, backwards-looking genre tropes to become 2 and a bit minutes of so-right-now brilliance. Refusing to stay stuck in the past, with Waterparks, every new thing is the greatest.
