Britain’s quintessential indie hipsters, The Kooks, are back with their third album Junk of the Heart after a three-year hiatus. Known for their rousing choruses and tongue-in-cheek lyrics, The Kooks are all about strings, fedoras, and black and white videos. This album attempts to change that, and the result is an unfulfilling, haphazard collection of songs.  

The album is all over the place, and while there’s no musical coherence to it, there are a few decent songs which sound more like their earlier material, including “Mr. Nice Guy,” “Eskimo Kiss,” and title track “Junk Of The Heart (Happy).”  

The Kooks have tried to switch it up on Junk of the Heart by introducing a little electronic pop to their sound—songs like “Runaway” attempt to combine their signature acoustic twang with arcade-like bleeps, and they even ventured as far as adding violin-backed interludes to “Time Above Earth”—but these attempts at sound evolution and growth fall short of anything that will bring in new listeners, and won’t appeal to original Kooks fans.  

If Junk of the Heart tells us anything, it’s that the Kooks need to stop striving for something that will always be just out of their reach: maturity. They need to embrace the youth of their fan base and go back to doing what they were doing. Their albums may not define a genre, but at least they were enjoyable.