the vaselines

The Scottish indie-rockers are back with prototypical tunes and more confident-sounding guitar work.

Most of us were not cool enough to hear about Glasgow indie-pop darlings the Vaselines until after Kurt Cobain championed them as one of his favorite bands and Nirvana covered their 1987 songs “Molly’s Lips” and “Son of a Gun” on Incesticide.

“One Lost Year” is the first single from V for Vaselines, the band’s third album following 2010’s Sex with an X, and, remarkably, it sounds as timeless as all their other recordings. Band founders Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee sing with the same youthful voices that first hit tape in the late ’80s. And the melodies here bob and bounce with the same balance of innocence and tension that helped pioneer the twee-pop subgenre.

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