‘Damn, overslept!” goes the opening line of Bogus Operandi, the first track on the Hives’ first album in a decade. A gruesome rock’n’roll tragicomedy, the single is a breakneck drive through the Swedish rockers’ mythology, plying us with the “real” reason for the 10-year wait: Randy Fitzsimmons, the fictional enigma whom they claim recruited the band and wrote all their music is – pause for effect – dead!
As character assassinations go, The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons is a riotously good time. It’s no major reinvention of the Hives’ electrified vocals, staccato guitar, and relentless pace, but it finds the band heavier, louder and faster than ever: tyres screech on Trapdoor Solution, a 64-second Looney Tunes sprint. When the band’s cartoonishly energetic second album, 2000’s Veni Vidi Vicious, secured them fame almost a decade after their formation, their star could have burned fast and bright, but 30 years of frenzied live shows have made the group formidably tight.
Their bratty humour remains central but the shadows are creeping in: Crash Into the Weekend spins ever faster as singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist climbs out “from the bottom of a bottomless pit”. Smoke & Mirrors is a sneering punk track with a rare bitterness and Stick Up’s eerie, noirish grandeur nods at their friendship with recent tour mates Arctic Monkeys. Then again, Two Kinds of Trouble is vintage Hives, with a riff like a thunderbolt and a broken-down third act that will whip crowds into chaos. The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons might just be a second coming.
