Courting's New Last Name

By: Miles Silverstein

New Last Name – the alt-pop of the future. 26th January saw the release of the second LP from Liverpool-based art punks, Courting. New Last Name is genuine and refreshing – a record replete with ingenious sound and innovative fusions while masterfully holding an authentic underpinning of love and loss in the modern world.

Recorded alongside their 2022 debut Guitar Music, though released a year and a half later, New Last Name sets a high bar. If the widely-acclaimed Guitar Music was just the throwaways, gimme the good stuff! Nonetheless, Courting manages to deliver in a way that not only comfortably settles them into the alt-pop canon, but sets the stage for the future of the genre.

Courting is a band situated confidently in the space between identities. Their first record started off with ‘Cosplay/Twin Cities,’ a seemingly serene harp composition that melts its face off (think Terminator 2) to reveal an industrial robot-stomp that sets the tone for the myriad electronic influences peppered across the rest of the album. Sure there’s guitar music, as advertised, but the album is so much more. It’s a rough expression of a special discontentment, a transitory moment between their strict post-punk beginnings (see EP Grand National, singles ‘Football’, ‘David Byrne’s Badside’) and the fluidly creative point where they find themselves now. Through catchy hooks and slick pop sheens, the band conveys fresh experimentations and steps out of the shell they wore for their earlier output. The electronica of Guitar Music is all over New Last Name, and the way in which Courting balanced themselves between hyperpop, britpop, and post-punk is so damned creative and genuine that there’s no way these guys don’t break out in the next few months – big time! Through the reggaeton influence of ‘The Hills’ or hyperpop breaks in ‘Happy Endings’, it’s clear that the band has found a voice that is both authentic and an inspiring harbinger of pop to come.

I’ve been to two Courting shows. Front row each time. And the next time they’re in Edinburgh, I’ll be in the front row too. I’ve seen the whites of frontman Sean Murphy-O’Neill’s eyes, stolen smiles and winks from guitarist Joshua Cope, and taken a setlist from the offering hands of bassist Connor McCann. The first of these shows was prior to the release of their first record, and that setlist bore finished songs that would not see a widely available studio recording until January 2024. I vividly remember the walk back home: ears ringing, voice shot, my shirt soaked with sweat, and wearing a broad smile. A year and a half later, that same grin is creeping across my face as ‘Happy Endings’ flirts with hyperpop a minute and forty five seconds in, only to open up into a stadium pop anthem that makes Everything Everything look like amateur hour. 

And with a seamless transition, we are led into the tour de force that is ‘America,’ the closing track and New Last Name’s namesake. In contrast to more fun and happy-go-lucky odes like ‘We Look Good Together’ or ‘Flex’, ‘America’ gets real. Rife with brilliant metaphors about a doomed situationship, the suite begs the utmost sympathy with its repeats of “I know we talk quite a lot, but I just don’t want to get involved just yet.” It is pained. It is real. Eschewing the traditional ballad’s penchant for touchy, longful strokes of surrealist loving, ‘America’ evokes the same affectionate dispossession instead with the simplicity of comfort (as O’Neill puts it, “involved not in the Celine Dion way – we watched Amazon Prime, and I slept that night”). It invokes the struggle of belonging somewhere, to someone, in this out-of-touch, alienated epoch; if just for a moment there could be some assurance, some recompense and safety from a marooning day-to-day. Courting has doubtless assumed the mantle of lonely bedroom tearful scream-pop, the perfect soundtrack to the seemingly minimal yet emotionally maximal break-off. Maybe it never was, but now that it never will be, it hurts all the more: “We can talk, it just won’t be the same. You’ve got an 020 number now – you’ve got a new last name.”