As plain-spoken purveyors of wildly pretentious art-pop, Wild Beasts have always been a swirl of contradictions. Perhaps this explains the mixed messages the Lake District quartet have sent out ahead of their fifth album, Boy King - an undertaking they have variously described as their definitive statement and as a stark break with their past.
But maybe that's not such a clash of values after all. Assembled in Dallas with St Vincent producer John Congleton ("If you need a record with big balls, you go to Texas," quipped singer Hayden Thorpe recently), Boy King is Wild Beasts at their catchiest and most propulsive. It's bold and brassy, a weather front of Nine Inch Nail guitars and electronic beats.
Yet at the same time the band are assuredly sloughing off their little boy lost persona, with Thorpe delving into some rather lusty territory ('Get My Bang' is actually a rumination on consumerism run amok - not that you'd guess from a cursory listen). This freshly arrived at directness is, it would appear, largely attributable to Congleton who encouraged the group to trust their feelings and not over-intellectualise the process.
"Many times overthinking is the death of a good idea," Thorpe has commented of Congleton's production philosophy. "You realise that there's such a 'fuck you' arrogance to going with the sloppiest take, there's such a power to it."
To this new, hard-punching outlook, Wild Beasts have grafted one of their characteristically lofty concepts. 'The Boy King' refers to the stereotypical ego-drunk male rock star: master of the stage, tour bus and dressing-room even as he flees responsibility, stability and adulthood.
Alongside the alpha dude priapism there is also, naturally, a fair degree of self-loathing, so that it is hard to tell whether punk-funk rattlers 'Big Cat' and 'Tough Guy' are swaggering rock songs or pithy deconstructions of same. And by the time Wild Beasts get to centrepiece 'Celestial Creatures', their discomfort in their own skin has become almost unbearable.
"Handsome woman what do you want with me?," howls Thorpe, torn between desire and disgust as a Kasabian-style lad-rock bassline thunks in the background. Rarely have the perks of mid-level indie stardom been made to feel so clammily terrifying. Boy King is a record that, even as it sticks its crotch in your face, can't stop wiping away the tears.