His Lordship - Bored Animal (2025) Hi-Res

Conceived and recorded live in under two weeks at Edwyn Collins’ studio in the Highlands of Scotland, with engineer Sean Reed and mixed by David Wrench (Manic Street Preachers, Let’s Eat Grandma, Blur, Baxter Dury), for Bored Animal His Lordship decided to streamline their sound—forgoing things like harmonies, a rockabilly influence, and songs over four minutes long—and didn’t worry about making the music perfect.

The resultant album crams multiple ideas into its 11 concise songs. On opening title track, clanging guitars and drums rattle the speakers before the song takes off like a screaming bottle rocket.

From there, guitarist/vocalist James Walbourne and drummer Kris Sonne race through ferocious songs with clever lyrics, which lean into scorching rock ‘n’ roll (the abrasive ‘Old Romantic’, needling ‘Downertown’), distorted punk (the ramshackle ‘Marc-Andre Léclerc’), tornadic noise rock (‘Weirdo in the Park’), throttling garage-blues riffs and feral howls (sub-three-minute ‘The Sadness of King Kong’), and even psychedelic fantasias (‘Derek E. Fudge’).

As with their debut, Bored Animal makes room for an instrumental (the album-closing Western noir ‘Gin and Fog’) and Sonne contributes lead vocals to a track (the aforementioned ‘Derek E. Fudge).

And while Bored Animal’s songs take cues from vintage rock ‘n’ roll, the album is decidedly not a retro rehash or homage to the past. When His Lordship make music, their mighty, rambunctious roar emerges naturally, realising that to leave something that’s a mistake is where the magic is.

More than anything, His Lordship embrace the idea everything is fleeting, so the best way to live – and make music – is to seize the day, trust their instincts and aim to deliver on the promise of early rock’n’roll: in and at ‘em songs which do not outstay their welcome, just leave the listener viscerally thrilled, confused and hungry for more. Bored Animal delivers on that promise.

When I think back to the gigs that made up my formative years, I think of places like Leicester’s Princess Charlotte (later just The Charlotte, and sadly now long defunct), the place absolutely dripping with the sweat of revellers, filthy walls that would ruin your t-shirt and a bustling, carefree crowd that would be Health and Safety’s biggest nightmare. Those kind of places are as rare as a Northern White Rhino these days, but you know what? Listening to His Lordship, I FEEL LIKE I’M BACK THERE AGAIN. And I love it!

Feral and strident, title track Bored Animal comes hurtling in, no holds barred, frontman James Walbourne (presently guitarist for The Pretenders as well as being one half of The Rails) possesses a versatile vocal style that lies somewhere between Gary Numan during his early days with Tubeway Army and Jack White. Indeed, ‘I Fly Planes Into Hurricanes‘ is the kind of noisy rocker that The White Stripes would visit on their 2002 single ‘Fell In Love With A Girl‘, but that notwithstanding, perhaps a more accurate comparison for at least a fair chunk of Bored Animal would be the recently broken up Canadian duo Japandroids. They were rowdy fuckers too, at least sonically.

Let’s not be too hasty though in pigeonholing this duo, because on the other hand, they’re producing tracks like ‘Derek E Fudge‘, its menacing, severely ominous bassline giving a fervorous nod to Link Wray‘s ‘The Shadow Knows‘, the curious art-pop of Devo and the vivid storytelling of The Pretty Things‘ 1968 ‘rock opera’ S.F. Sorrow. All this, while maintaining an uneasily playful bent, the line “He once stabbed someone to death…with a screwdriver!” being delivered in true 1950s rock and roll style.

There is much here to embrace – it’s fast-paced, explosive and provocative, accompanied by a delightful dollop of downright silliness along the way, with songs like ‘The Sadness Of King Kong‘ making us marvel in wonder, and the punkish ‘Weirdo In The Park‘ all gnarly post-punk. There’s even a hint of The Libertines on the frenetic, smart songwriting of ‘Johnny Got No Beef‘.

Ending the record with ‘Gin And Fog‘ was an inspired decision – after all the filth and the fury that makes up the rest of Bored Animal, a number that seemingly takes its cue from the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone is a welcome reprieve, after which, the only possible conclusion you can feasibly come to is that you’ve simply just witnessed a great rock and roll album.