Poor old Hard-Fi. Even after a multi-platinum debut album they aren’t the best-known cultural phenomenon to emerge from Staines – not while the memory of Ali G lingers on. Perhaps that’s why Richard Archer and his crew have chosen to embrace their background rather than deny it. From the title to the artless sleeve design to the self-aggrandising lead-off single Suburban Knights, they romanticise their own perfectly mundane origins. Archer has even claimed that the peripheral zones are a production line for significant ideas.

That might be true for car customisers, but usually artistic scenes coalesce around groups of like-minded folks not usually found in dormitory towns. Supposedly, rock’n’roll music is the sound of the city – or, at the very least, its interpretation by those who dwell outside the city walls. This matters because Hard-Fi, down to their meaningless name (see also Coldplay), want to claim a constituency after being marginalised for so long.

No wonder that their breakthrough sound owed much to New Order’s World in Motion, that indie-disco football classic. It’s no coincidence that a Hard-Fi tune was used for a recent beer ad that showed a huge flock of birds over the word “belong”. This time they nod to the eternally adored Clash. Suburban Knights is reminiscent of the Clash’s cruder moments, but the touches of melodica and spacey echo throughout are more obvious indicators.

Yet Hard-Fi’s strength is not in tributes. Simply, Archer writes good, big choruses often enough to tag several songs as singles. The ballad Tonight, with its mentions of “the Great West Road”, might be essentially meaningless (what are the band planning? An armed raid on Heathrow?) but it certainly is catchy. Television dares to rhyme its title with “new religion”, yet the “Hallelujah” hooks are real earworms, and the same goes for the chants on the snappy I Close My Eyes. Even the chirpily idealistic We Need Love, apparently inspired by Billy Bragg yet evoking Tainted Love with a brass band in tow, sounds a surefire hit, even if the rest is relative filler.

Unlike great suburbanites such as Springsteen and Weller, Hard-Fi never aspire to escape. Perhaps these days even a successful act can never hope to move to town. Middle-aged men stuck in the suburbs – they can’t be too different from their neighbours. No wonder they sell so many records.

(Atlantic)

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