Pop music for people who still have a sense of humour

Welly have been away.

After the shiny pop joy of debut album Big in the Suburbs, they seemed to disappear.

For a while.

Except they didn’t.

Instead, Welly headed out on a seemingly endless cycle of touring, taking the Welly experience around Britain and beyond: clubs, festivals, seaside towns and whatever other rooms could be persuaded to contain them.

Which is probably appropriate. Big in the Suburbs took around six years to make, its songs gradually accumulating while the band developed their own peculiar universe of school discos, shopping centres, provincial boredom and suburban aspiration. By the time everyone else finally got to hear it, Welly had presumably already grown tired of waiting.

While the world was discovering album one, Welly were getting on with album two.

And somewhere between the motorway services and indie clubs they found time to craft another collection of tunes with which to impress or annoy your friends.

Depending on how much you like them.

The friends, not the songs.

You’ll like the songs.

And so Welly are back, back, back.

Skinny Boy bounds into view powered by cheap synths and bouncing melodies, tumbling around like a particularly excitable puppy on a skateboard.

Frontman Welly – actually Elliot Hall, but he goes by the name of Welly, the same as his band, which presumably saves considerable administrative time – surveys another corner of modern Britain and finds plenty to amuse himself with.

This time he turns his attention towards the depressive hegemony of youth culture. A seemingly endless procession of identikit hipster indie boys file past his particular pop throne in whichever backwater club Welly has found himself deposited in that evening. Everyone determinedly expressing their individuality in remarkably similar ways.

The 1960s called and they want their moustache back…

But Welly’s real trick is that the sneering never quite becomes cynical. There’s too much joy in the music for that. Skinny Boy isn’t standing outside the party complaining about everybody inside. It has already kicked the door open, rearranged the furniture and started dancing on the table.

There’s something almost music hall about Hall’s lyrical fluency and arch delivery. He tosses lines away with that particularly English ability to make an insult sound like an observation about the weather.

Eyebrow cocked.

Withering epithet prepared for all occasions.

There’s a lineage here stretching from Anthony Newley through David Bowie and Pete Shelley to Jarvis Cocker: English pop music as social observation, finding characters in the mundane and turning everyday absurdity into theatre. Welly himself has talked about being inspired as much by Harry Hill’s TV Burp, Dick and Dom and Horrid Henry as by other musicians, which actually makes perfect sense.

Why restrict yourself to rock history when Saturday-night television was considerably stranger?

Musically, Skinny Boy represents a subtle shift. The homemade aesthetic remains, but the cheap-and-cheerful keyboards have been pushed towards the dancefloor. Pet Shop Boys type melodies bounce against chiming guitars while everything careers forwards with the breathless urgency of someone who has just remembered the last bus leaves in four minutes.

This isn’t Welly abandoning suburbia.

It’s Welly leaving the house.

That distinction matters. Big in the Suburbs found an entire world in dead-end streets, shopping centres, school discos and nosy neighbours. Hall has described suburbia as a genuine muse, somewhere filled with overlooked characters and narratives. Skinny Boy takes that same observational instinct into the clubs and venues the band have spent the intervening months inhabiting.

The scenery changes.

The camera held to society remains.

And then, sensibly, it ends.

No ponderous middle eight. No eight-minute voyage into the artist’s soul. No indication that anybody involved believes they are making Dark Side of the Moon.

Just pop music.

Bright. Sarcastic. Restless. Slightly ridiculous.

A breathless romp through everything you didn’t know you wanted until somebody dropped it on your doorstep.

The debut album celebrated the Great British suburb.

Skinny Boy suggests Welly might now be ready to find out what happened to all the people who escaped from it.