There’s a clip from a 2023 Rock Sound interview where Dave Grohl, in the most dad-at-the-barbecue way possible, praises Wet Leg for having “a bass and a guitar and some drums and there’s people singing.” It’s the kind of line that resurfaces unbidden when listening to Again, the second LP from Melbourne’s Belair Lip Bombs. Yes, they have all the required parts. Yes, they play them well. But describing a rock band by listing its ingredients is like calling a pastry “a combination of flour and butter” when what you’re really craving is the spark—the flavor—that makes it unforgettable. On Again, the Lip Bombs meet every prerequisite for a rock band signed to Third Man Records; what they don’t do is carve out the space needed to rise above the ever-swelling crowd.
To their credit, Again isn’t hollow; it’s just unsharpened, a well-lit room without a focal point. The hooks are crisp and plentiful, made warmer by Maisie Everett’s steady, honeyed vocals and buoyed by Mike Bradvica’s radiant, scene-stealing guitar work. At its most luminous, the album flickers with the glow of messy early-20s nights—half-formed feelings, cheap thrills, stupid mistakes you defend with your whole chest. “Don’t Let Them Tell You (It’s Fair)” is a through-the-teeth self-pep talk dressed in shimmering chords, while “Hey You” thrashes open-heartedly, turning romantic desperation into a small, scrappy victory march.
But Again is an album built on peaks rather than plateaus, and the valleys are harder to ignore. Vagueness is the band’s fatal flaw: their love songs are crowded with clichés, scattered metaphors, and magazine-spread imagery that gestures at coolness without actually saying anything. Tracks like “Cinema” and “Another World” collapse under their own vagueness, pairing hazy lyricism (“Slip into your grasp like a magazine/Moving to your rhythm like a tambourine”) with melodies too blurry to elevate them. Lines like “Used to be the baddest bitch around” feel borrowed from a post-2020 pop songwriting mood board, rather than lived experience. When the band narrows its lens—like on the restless, breath-held tension of “Smiling”—the emotional clarity is striking. But these moments are exceptions rather than the rule.
The closing track, “Price of a Man,” finally lands the cinematic, throat-tight resonance the band has been reaching for, a widescreen payoff that hints at a deeper voice the Lip Bombs haven’t fully tapped yet. But by the time it arrives, much of the album has already blurred together, echoing the familiar shapes of a dozen rock bands who themselves grew up worshipping a dozen others. Again nods at timelessness, but more often feels like déjà vu.
What distinguishes the Belair Lip Bombs from the sprawling family tree of Strokes descendants still skittering around the global indie-rock ecosystem? Again doesn’t provide an answer. Maybe that’s why the title feels so apt: it’s not that the band isn’t talented—it’s that, for better or worse, we’ve heard this one before.
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