After nine years, Bag Raiders are back and have taken a chill pill on Horizons.
If you’re online enough, there’s a decent chance you’ve heard Bag Raiders. You might not have heard of “Bag Raiders,” the Australian electronic duo of Jack Glass and Chris Stracey, but you’ve heard their music. Why? For inexplicable reasons, their song “Shooting Stars” became a meme that peaked in early 2017. This meme paired a few seconds of the song’s very distinctive melody with freeze frames of people falling through outer space. That’s bizarre enough on its own, but the actual weirdest part of this meme is that the song had been out for almost a decade before receiving its viral fame, and the meme itself significantly surpassed Bag Raiders’ popularity. Like most memes, it disappeared as quickly as it emerged, but not before peaking with a cameo in Katy Perry’s music video for the awful song “Swish Swish.”
It’s a bit of a shame to think of Bag Raiders as “the group behind the meme song,” since their 2010 self-titled debut was fantastic. It was brimming with top-tier dance tracks, with instrumentals like the stellar opener “Castles in the Sky” and the quirky “Snake Charmer.” There were vocal-driven synthpop tracks like “Sunlight” and “Not Over.” Even “Shooting Stars” was a pretty good single, with its unorthodox synthesizer melody that creeps up a half-step at a time before a grand finale chorus. The whole thing was super high-octane from start to finish, and remains one of the best dance albums to replay over and over. A steady stream of EPs followed the debut, and then the meme explosion occurred, but a second full length album seemed far off.
Nine years later, Bag Raiders have finally released their sophomore studio album Horizons, and it couldn’t be more different from their debut.
Horizons is the kind of album that can be summed up with the phrase “chill vibes.” it sounds very much like an album made for the digital and social media age, with its subdued beats that bring relaxed landscapes like poolsides and faded pastel colors to mind. This is in sharp contrast to the more angular, intense energy of their self-titled album, which helped Bag Raiders stand out from their Australian contemporaries like Cut Copy, Miami Horror, and Empire of the Sun by generally amping things up. Now, Horizons has more in common with groups like Hot Chip, Metronomy, and most of all, Classixx, with some tracks that are primed for the dancefloor and others that are more for kicking back.
Horizons opens on a breezy note with “Faraway,” and its soothing tones coupled with a verse about a sunrise really demonstrate that Bag Raiders are turning over a new leaf on this album. It sets the stage well, even if it would have been unthinkable that the duo would make something to unwind to a few years ago. There are similar mellow songs throughout Horizons, from the very ethereal “Anchor” or the mild and appropriately-titled “Lazy.” Other tracks straddle the line between restraint and bounciness, like “How Long” and “Medicine,” which both have a house beat, quieter vocals, and parts where the harmony cuts out as if to give some breathing room. Bag Raiders might be just about a decade late for chillwave, but Horizons embodies that cool, “summer music” sound.
Bag Raiders haven’t gone full decaf on Horizons though, and a good portion of the album has the same underlying vivaciousness that made their debut so memorable. If you’re dismayed by the new sound during an initial listen, “I Need You” introduces a pulsating bass beat about a minute in to inject some danceability and remind you why you tuned in. “Back to Myself” pits a heavy breakbeat against heavenly harp and delicate piano sounds, a surprisingly successful combination, while “Lightning” has the same kind of anthemic chorus that made tracks like “Sunlight” explode in the past. Horizons also ends on a high note with the excellent “In This Life.” While this song starts vaguely like Bastille’s “Pompeii,” it fortunately changes into a hi-hat heavy dance beat and piano combo with a strong synth finale. Its only lyric is the repeated line “in this life I just wanted to love you,” but the emotional weight behind it coupled with the instrumentals help the track really resonate.
There are only a few peculiarities on Horizons that can’t really be chalked up to its newer sounds. For instance, the glitch-like beat of “I’ll Be Loving You” is fairly jarring compared to everything else on the album. Relatedly, the falsetto vocals that span from “I’ll Be Loving You” through Breakdown” and into “Anchor” cause this trio of tracks to blend together a bit. Horizons also notably lacks any instrumental tracks, which is a bit of a shame considering the duo’s past knack for wordless bangers. Additionally, while I called Friendly Fires’s recent album Inflorescent “mindless” for its simplistic lyrics, I feel like I owe them a bit of an apology after Horizons. Sure, “Wild at Heart” embraces youthful fun and carelessness, and it’s adorable when applied to dogs like the video above, but lines like “we’ll be wild at heart forever, all we know is to be free” and “dreamers never die” sound plucked from Instagram account that uses the word “wanderlust” somewhere. Similarly, the repetitive lines about wanting to do nothing with someone on “Lazy” make it a tough sell.
It’s easy to be taken aback by the new styles on Horizons initially, especially if you were expecting anything similar to their first full-length, and it won’t immediately grab your attention in the same way. However, it’s very much worth remembering that different doesn’t necessarily mean worse. In an interview with Atwood Magazine, Stracey said: “If youʼre making varied music that doesnʼt necessarily stick to a single genre, then youʼre naturally going to want to release a body of work in the form of an album because to you It might seem that the tunes will be better appreciated in that context.” Horizons very much fits this bill, as its disparate tracks fit together well under the umbrella of a newer, balmier Bag Raiders.
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