Heartache in Heartland: The Vaccines nail loner-rock anthems with ‘Pick-Up Full Of Pink Carnations’
The band share their sixth album.
Photo: Rolling Stone
Veterans of the late 2000s indie rock scene, The Vaccines have struggled to put a foot wrong since the fervour of their early years. They knew when to feed on the punky discontent of the youth under a newfound Tory government in 2011, they embraced the digital age with an electro influence in English Graffiti, and went full on Americana-obsessive with 2021’s Back in Love City.
All the while, there’s been a thread running through The Vaccines’ work. A lot if it’s about heartbreak, and pretty much all of it sounds massive, whether you’re drinking with your best mates, or watching the sun rise alone in the morning mist.
Pick-Up Full Of Pink Carnations, the group’s latest effort – and their sixth studio album overall – doesn’t shake from that formula. Building on the big ‘open’ sound of its predecessor, it’s pure heartbreak in the Californian sun. Opening with brash Sometimes, I Swear, it’s clear the four-piece (one man down after guitarist Freddie Cowan left the group in 2023) know their audience. It’s a massive anthem, with a clattering chorus and wall of fuzz.
Heartbreak Kid, the lead single off Carnations, sounds as fresh as it did all those months ago. Drawing from personal experience, no doubt, singer Justin Young delivers the same thumping verses he did over a decade ago, rivalling If You Wanna or Wetsuit. And the comparisons don’t stop there. The band employ the same sense of economy present in their early stuff, putting out the sub-three minute Lunar Eclipse, one of the best tunes on the record. “We took a trip / Under a lunar eclipse,” belts Young, and for a moment all the darkness in the world is lit up and shimmering.
Discount De Kooning (Last One Standing), whose accompanying video dropped the same day as the album, sounds delightfully indie, covered in glitzy synth with the top down. Side one closes out with Primitive Man, one of the group’s better album tracks.
“You said suck my blood / Out your middle finger” sets the scene for side two, with Sunkissed full of teenage reflection and rage in equal measure. Another Nightmare, meanwhile, could have easily been a sixth single, harking back to the boys’ Combat Sports days. Listening to a Vaccines record is pure bliss; Pick-Up Full Of Pink Carnations sets scenes of the golden age of Hollywood-style heartbreak to infectious, bite-sized rock tunes, chugging along with the horsepower of a bullet train.
Love to Walk Away is, by all accounts, a re-skin of Lunar Eclipse, but that hardly matters when it goes just as hard. The Dreamer, meanwhile, is one of the most ambitious efforts in the Vaccines’ catalogue, namechecking Poe, merging Fender-ish heartland rock with synth-pop and giving us possibly their most beautiful lines yet: “I was managing your expectations / On a pick-up full of pink carnations / With you begging me to cure the sickness of a rose”.
The album closes with Anonymous in Los Feliz, a track that – while not reaching the heights of some of the group’s other finales like Family Friend or Rolling Stones – is a fitting end to the Vaccines’ sixth LP. Young pleads his former flame to come back to him, pouring his heart and soul into an anthem that will no doubt grace the stage on the group’s upcoming tour.
At just ten tracks, Pick-Up Full Of Pink Carnations is a pretty conservative affair, but that word fits nowhere else with this record. Thirteen years on from the group’s debut, the band are making delectable noise from the ashes of burnt-out relationships, fusing tales of woe and heartache with Cadillac indie rock. It’s not even one month into the new year, and this group are already serving up one of 2024’s best releases. Long may they reign.