BIFFY CLYRO - A Celebration Of Endings LP

Label: Warner

Following 2019's ambitious soundtrack Balance, Not Symmetry, Scotland's Biffy Clyro return with their ninth studio album, 2020's brightly attenuated A Celebration of Endings. The album again finds them working with producer Rich Costey, who'd previously helmed 2016's Ellipsis and who has worked with similarly inventive indie rock luminaries like Muse, Fiona Apple, and Supergrass, among others. Since their emergence as a wiry post-grunge outfit in the early 2000s, Biffy Clyro have matured into a reliably consistent power trio known for their prog-inflected anthems that balance pop hooks with kinetically aggressive rock arrangements.

A Celebration Of Endings is a report from a world in desperate need of focus. ‘There’s nothing above us, below us are only corpses’ the band sing on North Of No South, the opening track, and from here the album bubbles, and occasionally explodes, with a turmoil that is rarely obtrusive. Biffy Clyro have delivered an album of restless invention, substance and style that arrives like a spray of water on the arid expanse of this saddest of summers.