Hurts first appeared half a decade ago, a duo from Manchester who aspired to Depeche Mode but sounded vaguely like OneRepublic and similar. Which is to say they dealt in stadium sized, studio-orchestrated melodrama that veered towards the ostentatious and hand-wringing. In mainland Europe, they’re big news and at home their previous two albums have been Top Ten.
With this third outing, Hurts have drifted into the realms of the preposterous. Most of Surrender consists of hysterical hi-NRG stomping delivered with po-faced bombast, like a cross between pop-prog megastars Muse and the 2005 Euro-cheese masterpiece “From Paris to Berlin” by Infernal. Are they trying to be taken seriously? I hope not. The grandiose stuff is at least entertaining, because you can’t quite believe it exists. “Some Kind of Heaven” (“I don’t need a symphony to sing my song because there’s a choir of angels deep inside my lungs”) is Erasure by way of Calvin Harris, “Weight of the World” comes on like La Roux on Mr Universe-level über-‘roids, and the fantastically over-the-top “Rolling Stone” is a monster somewhere between Lady Gaga and James Horner with a chorus that has to be heard to be believed (“She said her daddy was an alcoholic and her mother was animal/Now she’s living like a rolling stone/She said the law would never take her alive if they take her home”).
The slower stuff is unbearable, Eighties power ballad angst by way of 21st-century amplification. The whole of Surrender is redolent of those gigantic sci-fi cinema flops such as Battlefield Earth or Southland Tales, where the money’s there to see but it makes no difference to what a gigantic unpalatable mess it all is. While Chris Brown is still making records, it’s difficult to hand out 1/5s with equanimity, but occasionally they’re a necessary evil.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Lights"
