Deaf Havana - Rituals

The Guardian 40

(So Recordings)

Norfolk’s Deaf Havana’s nine-year career has been one of regular metamorphosis, as they have shifted from post-hardcore to Top 5-grazing commercial alternative rock. Here, they’re tearing up their own songwriting conventions. After years of writing songs on an acoustic guitar, frontman James Veck-Gilodi penned song titles first, those titles dictated the content and the songs themselves were written on software before the band got involved.

Strange, then, that this radical approach has led to such conventional, formulaic, 80s-style pop rock. The hooky Sinner and Ritual clearly have eyes on the 1975’s chart-hogging reinvention of a similar sound, but elsewhere Deaf Havana’s shift to pop is overproduced and laboured.