Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

In the modern age, with the takeover of social media and the sense of a more persuasive, open society, Everyone Knows more than they ever could about the minutest detail of your life, the so called reaching out, the tell me all society has become a millstone around the neck of private thought; and if you don’t comply, if you refuse to take part, then you get left behind, labelled as being cold, anti-social and lacking in empathy and emotionless to the core.

Everyone knows, except perhaps the person who is singing from the song sheet of their own frustrations, the one to whom has kept it all in and won’t allow themselves the luxury of confiding in that one person who they know will make everything alright. For fear, with the feeling of no control, everybody knows, but them.

It is to The New Icons that the sense of the downbeat melancholy plays with such affection in their latest single taken from the album Electric Ghost Graffiti, a sound created that has its heart from the initial frame of the song that craves, and succeeds, in its desire to tell a story, not one of Kings and dragons, of the epic, but instead of the everyday emotions we seek to address, that we perhaps hide away from. A delivery of consequence completing the detail in a way that you can’t help but identify with, that you know at some point in your own past, you may have wanted to utter and confirm with all that stood around you, pointing fingers, holding you up as you face the damnation.

In many cases a downbeat sound rubs against the feeling of nostalgia in the wrong way, and yet, as the modern age of communication almost gift wraps the sense of control of others for the protagonist to fear talking out, Everyone Knows is more in keeping with the soul, with the understanding that we say what we have to with guarded tongue, that some secrets are not worth divulging.

With more than a feeling of haunting memory in the song, The New Icons have announced themselves wonderfully in this new single; adept, forthright, deliberate, Everyone Knows for sure how good the band are.

The New Icons’ single Everyone Knows is out now.

Ian D. Hall