By accidental stumble, or a sheer genius feel for dance beats, Foster The People stepped into grandiose fame after their debut Torches took over “indie” dance club floors worldwide led by smash hit single ‘Pumped Up Kicks’, a twistedly joyful song about a school shooting. Needless to say, after the incredible success of the first record, the band led by Mark Foster struggled to capture the same unabashedly dance-y success on their 2014 sophomore release Supermodel. While it showcased the poignant – if somewhat obvious – lyricism of the frontman, it lacked the same catchy and familiar-but-unique sound. Armed with a familiar Fitzgerald rip-off, straight off an edgy quote book writing, and about six different genres of today’s mainstream music, third record Sacred Hearts Club tries to recapture the same groovy electronica of their debut, while being a hopeful call-to-arms after the apocalyptical nature of the last couple of years.

Needless to say, Sacred Hearts Club is a weird, Frankenstein’s monster of a record. Difficult to put together under a singular summary, it seems like Foster decided that quantity is quality. The album opens up with ‘Pay The Man’, leading you into a false sense of comfort derived from the song’s admittedly catchy production and what would pass for a decent rap verse in a white suburban party. The song melds together the synthetic beat the band is known for with The Neighbourhood-like structure and flow rather seamlessly, and is only brought down by the out of place trite lyrics of the chorus. “Say what you love, it’s alright / Don’t be afraid to find your light” makes you consider the thin line between inspirational and eye roll inducing.

Sadly, after the opener, the album really takes a tragic decrease in listenability. ‘Doing It For The Money’ borders on actually awful. For all the ‘dance music subversion’ Foster The People seem to market, the song somehow ended up with the most generic verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure, only made worse by the lyrics that prompt the question is there really an audience for Mark Foster preaching about hope and artistic integrity. The following songs ‘Sit Next To Me’ and ‘S.H.C.’ both seem to be trying their best to capture whatever circa-V Maroon 5 did right. The former even comes packaged with a funky bass line and ‘80s synthesizers. It’s like Foster had someone describe a Bruno Mars hit to him and then made a song based on that description.

It doesn’t get any better from there. The two interlude tracks ‘Orange Dream’ and ‘Time To Get Closer’ sound dug out straight out of Kevin Parker’s trash bin. The hyped-up single ‘Loyal Like Sid & Nancy’ comes just about as close to “subversion” as this album gets. If they took one cool thing the band did the first time around, it’s the dark, referential lyrics juxtaposed with the wannabe club-banger. Listen to it two times in a row, however, and your head starts to throb in pain, in sync with the EDM beat of the song.

You can’t blame Foster The People for not trying though. Pulling from and referencing so many different things, at least it’s obvious that some form of real effort and passion was put into the recording of Sacred Hearts Club. Sadly, it’s not the Torches-worthy return fans might hope for. The beauty of their debut came not from how necessarily subversive it was or how it broke new ground, because it didn’t really. What it did was manage to pull from different influences without making them obvious. The closest comparison people came up with at the time was MGMT but, even then, only acknowledging that at the same time it sounded nothing like MGMT. And that makes it only that more painful that every track on Sacred Hearts Club is so easy to pin down, and that Foster The People, who had somehow managed to carve themselves a genre of their own within a single record, is wearing their influences on their sleeve so obviously. (4/10) (Ellie Wolf)

Listen to Sacred Hearts Club here via Spotify, and tell us what you think below!