Latest offering from Desperate Journalist is an indie adrenaline rush.

 

Modern indie music isn’t the easiest genre in which to deliver intensity. Years of spacious guitars have sapped the scene of much of the energy and fire that it once had. Fortunately, Desperate Journalist is offering salvation in the form of Resolution.

Combining a female vocal suited for hard-hitting alt-rock or (almost) melodic metal with urgent drums and reverb-laden guitars, Resolution is indie-rock in a very mid-80s sense. Think a gothic-tinged blur of REM, The Smiths and The Cure. It has the raw vibe and passionate intensity of the post-punk indie scene, with all the effect benefits of being a modern act with a cutting sense of lyricism.

And cutting it most certainly is. Angled as outsider insight into the short-lived absurdity of New Year’s Eve celebrations and atmosphere, it’s not your typical end-of-the-year song. Then again, it was never intended to be.

“The song was written in a hotel room after a New Year’s Eve party when I was feeling particularly peculiar, unable to drink and on a lot of codeine,” explained Desperate Journalist vocalist Jo Bevan. “NYE is obviously an unusually heightened time to feel completely out of the loop with a group and when that happens to me, like everything else I can’t really cope with, I romanticise it into filmic fragments.

“The countdown to midnight was dramatized massively by the band we were watching and I couldn’t escape fixating on teenage thoughts. How many cliched repetitive conversations/fun times you have with people on significant days of the year, how emotionally awkward the midnight kiss was for so many of us, the people making big pointless romantic gestures, and the general warm frenzy of everyone else from the weird cold bubble of where I was. Broadly speaking, the song is about being detached and overstimulated.”