Album Review: London Grammar, The Greatest Love

Acclaimed UK outfit London Grammar’s fourth album is a mature, well-crafted effort, which deftly showcases the trio’s penchant for experimentation without sacrificing the ingredients which helped turn them into a revered, award-winning group in the first place.

The project is characterised by atmospheric arrangements blending with singer Hannah Reid’s at-times earth-shattering vocals, which continue to shine. Opener ‘House’ sets a confident tone with its garage rhythms and assertive lyrics: “This is my place, my house, my rules.” While, like most tracks on the record, it stands apart, the tune introduces a recurring theme of gradual build-ups to massive crescendos.

Each song carries a carefully-layered, cinematic quality, with the string-laden ‘You And I’ particularly worthy of a blockbuster soundtrack. Elsewhere, bops like ‘Santa Fe’ and the sultry ‘Kind of Man’ infuse the album with catchy, memorable melodies and lingering choruses.

Meanwhile, there’s a shift in tone on ‘Fakest Bitch,’ which features a stripped-down, Taylor Swift-style narrative of friendship and betrayal. The LP holds up lyrically too, a particularly cutting highlight being the closer and title track, a piano ballad which rings with straightforward, hard-hitting calls of, “I need you because you are a woman / I’ll hate you because you are a woman / And I’ll love you because you are a woman.”

The Greatest Love is a seriously good album that deftly balances quieter moments with lush, expansive production.

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