Album Review: Bleeding Knees Club - Fade The Hammer

It’s been eight years since two young Gold Coast brats, Jordan Malane and Alex Wall, leapt the fence into the limelight as Bleeding Knees Club with their chaotic mishmash of pop-punk and surfer rock underlying pent-up youth anthems about girls and eschewing authority. But as quickly as they made a name for themselves, they seemed to drop off the radar. Talk of a second album was riddled with creative clashes between the duo and the label, to the point where Wall went out on his own. Now he’s hit the reset button and kick-started his old band with a fresh line-up and a fresh take on what the original pairing did best – making noise about the things that excite and irk them.

Wall is clearly the one with the vision; the multi-instrumentalist commands every song with his slightly nasally drawl, and it’s like the vintage Bleeding Knees Club never went away. But in so many ways this is definitely not the same band it was, and that’s a good thing with hindsight. Where Wall and Malane cashed in with cheeky jabs at the world with catchy one-liner choruses, this new version has plenty of slow burners (Cherry), fun, jangly surf-rock (lead single Kitchen), and down and out pop-punk (World).