WORTH A LOOK?: ****1/2
TRACKLIST: Love The Beginning; Silver Balloons; Landline; Back To Mine; Crying On The Inside; Heavenly; Deborah; Out (Out); Want You Back; Nothing Ever Changes; Tomorrow’s Yesterdays
Basking in these 11 tracks, Little Boots’ – real name Victoria Hesketh – love for all kinds of pop music becomes clear and even she has admitted in recent interviews that working with ABBA influenced this album leaving her thinking: ‘What would Benny do?’
- Read on for reasons including where to see Boots perform this year
This 1st became clear to us when we saw Hesketh live last year for what was an unexpectedly triumphant east London gig and the 1st time we’d seen her live since her heyday in the ’10s.
Hesketh told The Times about the ABBA influence this week: ‘A key change or a mad instrumental section or a choral bit? I just stopped caring what people thought.’ After forays into fashionable electronica, she says it was nice to go back to her disco-pop roots. ‘I felt quite ashamed of doing pop songs for a while.’
Our favourite track is recent song of the month Crying On The Inside which was initially written for Carly Rae Jepson and we just love the Robynesque line: ‘I know when you’re kissing her, you’ll taste me on her lips.’
It shares its love of ‘putting my favourite record on’ to channel feelings with single Landline which boasts a 70s disco swagger crossed with uplifting 90s house and is a tale of shared listening to the Backstreet Boys during romantic nights on phones that feels a world away in the iPhone age.
We fell in love with the album’s title track at that 2021 gig and said: ‘She is joined onstage by a male co-writer for a duet featuring the line: ‘ You had the best years of my life’ which feels like a cross between the Beautiful South, Marc Almond and 70s middle-of-the-road rock. In a good way.’
The idea of celebrating music continues its golden thread through title track Tomorrow’s Yesterdays as the lyric runs: ‘Radio’s playing in the kitchen again/All dressed up, hey it’s only pretend’.
The album was largely conceived in Lancashire, where Hesketh spent much of lockdown with her family, going on long walks and doing production tutorials on YouTube so she could produce the record herself.
Tracks Out (Out) and lead single Silver Balloons are nostalgic for the days when Hesketh was a teenager going out in Blackpool with a fake ID and a shiny dress.
We 1st heard album opener Love Is The Beginning at that gig last year where it was the 1st song played and its prog rock drawing on the best of Fleetwood Mac really sets the tone for a collection that is unashamed in its magpie-like inspirations from a broad pallette going back to the best of the hits of the 70s.
We love Charli XCX and her new album Crash also released this week and on course to be number 1 on Friday was seriously vying for this album of the month accolade but it’s the warmth of the songwriting here which just sees Boots inch ahead.
New tracks we just have to mention include the joyous Vince Clarke/early Depeche Mode influences of Want You Back? and cool St Etienne ska of Nothing Ever Changes which could have come straight off that band’s extensive greatest hits collection.
Hesketh has been recruited as part of the live band for the ABBA Voyage shows which open in east London this spring. Tickets She’s also pregnant and so other chances to see her solo live again are currently limited but she is due to play the final date of Southsea’s Victorious Festival Tickets
Tomorrow’s Yesterdays is Little Boots 1st album for 7 years and it’s so good it’s exceeded our wildest expectations for it.
monstagigz 
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