The ReytonsA Love Letter To A Broken Town

Jukebox; Wish You Were There; Denton Rock; Busker's Paradise; Penny Pincher; Broken Promise of a Lullaby; Best Night of His Life; Wicker Arches; Hello How Are You Today?; Charlie Chalk's; Get the Badge In

There’s something wonderfully stubborn about The Reytons. While plenty of guitar bands spend their careers trying to escape the streets that shaped them, the Rotherham four-piece keep running back towards them, armed with loud guitars, sharp observations and a chorus designed to be screamed back by several thousand people.

The Rotherham band have always done things their own way – their fourth album has been released independently.

A Love Letter To A Broken Town is exactly what its title promises: affectionate, angry, funny and occasionally bruised. It finds The Reytons looking at the world around them and refusing to polish away the rough edges. This is music rooted in ordinary lives, questionable decisions, late nights and the peculiar pride that comes from knowing exactly where you’re from, best highlighted on Denton Rock.

The band's greatest strength remains their ability to turn everyday frustrations into indie-rock ammunition. There’s no pretence here, no unnecessary grandeur and precious little interest in disappearing down some experimental rabbit hole. The Reytons know what they are — and, crucially, they know what their audience wants.

That doesn't mean they've stood still, their success continues to grow, with Number One albums and a sold out arena tour to add to their CV, the Yorkshire band are one of the biggest indie guitar bands to emerge this decade.

There’s a greater sense of confidence running through the album than in their earlier work. The guitars still arrive with the urgency of a Friday-night punch-up, but the songwriting feels more assured, with bigger melodies and a stronger instinct for when to let a song breathe before launching into another enormous chorus. Their trademark combination of indie swagger and working-class storytelling remains firmly intact, but it sounds like the work of a band who now understand just how big their sound can become.

Of course, The Reytons have never been particularly interested in subtlety. Their songs are built to hit you in the chest rather than whisper sweet nothings into your ear. That can occasionally make the record feel a little predictable, but when the formula works, it works spectacularly. The hooks lodge themselves in the brain with alarming efficiency, while the lyrics have that distinctly British knack of finding humour in situations that probably aren't funny at all.

And that is ultimately what makes A Love Letter To A Broken Town so effective. Beneath the guitars and terrace-sized choruses is a genuine affection for people and places that don't always get the glossy treatment. The album doesn't romanticise the broken bits; it simply recognises that broken places can still produce brilliant stories, great nights and music worth shouting about.

There will inevitably be comparisons to the wave of British indie that came before them most notably Arctic Monkeys but The Reytons have long since stopped looking like a band merely borrowing somebody else's clothes. They've taken familiar ingredients — swaggering guitars, conversational vocals, pub-floor melodies and a healthy dose of northern grit — and turned them into something unmistakably their own.

A Love Letter To A Broken Town isn't trying to reinvent guitar music. It doesn't need to. Instead, The Reytons have made an album that understands the enduring appeal of a great riff, a massive chorus and a song that makes you want to put your arm around the person next to you and sing until your voice gives out.

It's rough around the edges, gloriously unpretentious and occasionally rowdy as hell.

In other words, it's The Reytons — and they're still very much in business.