The Love Buzz: Freeloaded (Cool Kitten)
(Self-release)
Out Now
There’s something gloriously unpolished about The Love Buzz that makes them feel immediately vital. On new single Freeloaded (Cool Kitten), the Cork scuzz-pop outfit bottle the chaos of late nights, dole-day delirium and sticky-floored indie discos into three minutes of fuzzed-out catharsis, and it absolutely rips.
Lifted from their forthcoming album Earworms, due this Autumn, the track thrives on contradiction. It swaggers in with a deceptively relaxed groove, plucking guitars and deadpan vocals, lulling you into a false sense of ease before the whole thing detonates into a blown-out rush of distortion, synth squeals and pitch-shifted vocals. It’s messy in the best possible way, like finding an old mixtape in the backseat of a car and realising every song still hits.
Sonically, Freeloaded (Cool Kitten) wears its influences proudly. There are flashes of Weezer in the crunching guitars and self-aware humour, while the bright melodic punch recalls Supergrass at their most playful. But The Love Buzz avoid feeling derivative by injecting the track with a distinctly modern sleaze-rock looseness, somewhere between garage-rock revival nostalgia and the kind of chaotic charm that made early-2000s indie discos feel immortal.
Produced alongside Chris Somers and Tom Rees, the band lean hard into imperfection. The broken Fuzz War pedal, detuned vocals and black-key-only MicroKorg setup give the single a rough-edged spontaneity that feels completely intentional. Nothing about ‘Freeloaded (Cool Kitten)’ sounds overworked; instead, it captures the thrill of a band catching lightning in a bottle before overthinking can ruin it.
Lyrically, the track romanticises aimlessness with a wink and a smirk. “The lyrics are about living on the dole and weekends that go on for months”, the band explain, and that sense of blurry, directionless youth pulses through every second of the song. Yet beneath the tongue-in-cheek delivery sits something strangely heartfelt, a celebration of drifting through your twenties with no plan beyond chasing the next buzz.
Having already built momentum through tours with NewDad and The Darkness, plus appearances at festivals including Glastonbury Festival and Electric Picnic, The Love Buzz are beginning to sound like a band ready to break out of cult-favourite territory. Freeloaded (Cool Kitten) feels like another major step in that direction, loud, addictive and impossible not to grin through.
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All words by Simon Lucas-Hughes. More writing by Simon Lucas-Hughes can be found at his author’s archive.
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