Album Review: Really Good Time, Affirmations

The world is pretty messed up, isn't it?

Especially if you're young. And with your attention vacuumed in every direction, it’s easy to be apathetic. Really Good Time’s debut, Affirmations, depicts this chaos before pushing it back and laughing at it.

The Dublin three-piece’s rock is angular and irreverent, placing obscure references and poetic monologues over gritty maelstroms of industrial guitar. Musically, they sound like Viagra Boys during a prison escape, before getting caught underneath one of those huge bucket-wheel excavators.

Affirmations' centrepiece is the song where he can't believe Bob Dylan was on Pawn Stars (look at the tracklist and guess which one it is). The narrator’s world falls apart over this factoid of consumerism: the disgust that a hero would succumb to such trash.

Except the trash and the myth come from the same machine, and the more he pares the internet for proof otherwise, the more ridiculous he looks. Other highlights include, 'Do It', whose chugging riffage will be familiar to anyone who watched the World Cup on RTÉ this summer.

It’s a sharp look at the struggle of maintaining relationships in a cost-of-living and housing crisis, and a world where even doing everything correctly won't help you. 'Dig Up, Stupid', part of the record’s cinematic final stretch, arrives on blockbuster swells of distortion – like being lost at sea in a Christopher Nolan film – before kicking into a tight, Krautrock groove.

A fantastic and frenzied accompaniment to the times we live in. You’ll do well to find a better Irish rock album this year.

9/10