Rock music is a strange, unsettling cultural artefact in 2025. The majority of new rock albums are by bands whose glory days lie 30 years behind them, who are well past their sell-by-dates, whose audiences comprise decrepit, midlife crisis-wracked members of the local Parent-Teachers Association. Their business models largely consist in churning out eerily familiar, for-streaming iterations of their own greatest hits – a clear attempt to keep the royalties trickling in and the kids in private school. This explains the disconcerting, zombie-like, uncanny nature of recent records by, for example, the Cure or the Manic Street Preachers, which sound like AI-generated versions of their own best work, calculated attempts to give the (former) kids the exact same dopamine hits that got them out of bed when they were doing their A Levels. The most macabre manifestation of this phenomenon are acts like Sam Fender who, despite being in his late 20s, self-consciously peddles a brand of music that no one of his own age would dream of listening to.
The recent Doves album, Constellations for the Lonely, falls solidly into this bracket, unfortunately. Unfortunate because the Doves are undoubtedly one of the best kept secrets in the history of British rock. Their first five albums – including the spectacular B-sides collection Lost Sides – are virtually flawless forays into the melancholy, psychedelic hangover of manic, hair-raising mid-90s Britpop, inestimably superior to anything ever essayed by the dread hand of the considerably more popular Coldplay, and in my opinion second only to Radiohead in the arch pantheon of turn-of-the-century guitar based indie miserabilism. The Doves never got the credit they deserved, and they probably never will, which is perhaps a karmic debt for the fact that they started out as cynical journeymen of early 90s Manchester dancepop – surely one of the most reprehensible “scenes” in the history of popular music, and I say that as someone who recently listened to a Limp Bizkit album from start to finish.
Constellations for the Lonely is good, solid, competently made, in the same way that the Cure’s recent Songs for a Lost World is. The influences are worn so transparently that it’s tempting to think that the Doves deliberately conceived of the album as some kind of Where’s Wally-style spot-the-musical-legends drinking game. From the plaintive piano and Lennon-McCartney thump of “Renegade”, to the delicate In Rainbows-era guitar of “In The Butterfly House”, to the driving Peter Hookian post-punk bass of “A Drop in the Ocean”, to the virtual Pink Floyd tribute that is “Strange Weather” – it makes for increasingly uncomfortable listening, like someone overegging the pudding in a funeral speech.
Sadly, though, this is what rock basically consists of in 2025 – an almost necrophiliac assemblage of lightly worn lineages. Which is not to say that there aren’t great moments on Constellations for the Lonely. “Cold Dreaming” is rousing, string laden, cinematic, and as good as anything the Doves made in the 2000s; “Yesterday’s Man” is a swooning meditation on middle-age and fatherhood; “Saint Theresa” is a lapsed Catholic paeon to the canonized crone and to faith in general, the closest they get here to genuine originality. I like most of it. It’s the Doves, after all, and they almost always deliver.
But even that fact, this sheer unrelenting competence, is somehow deflating, sobering, unsettling. The days of Axel Rose embarking on a madcap double album after the world-bestriding success of Appetite for Destruction, or Suede trying to write prog rock and pissing off all their fans after reliably delivering reams of radio-friendly Britpop, or Radiohead making an entire record on a laptop after selling a gazillion copies of OK Computer and sending NME into an apoplectic, guitar-shagging rage – these days of obstreperousness, of willful self-sabotage, of going your own way, are long gone. Now there’s just “great music”, well-made, expertly played, neatly delivered, to the point where you wonder if rock was ever that interesting in the first place.
Overall rating: * * *
Standout track: “Cold Dreaming”