From the moment the synths swell and the spoken word unfurls like a love letter scrawled across Glasgow’s sodium-lit pavements, VLURE’s ‘Better Days’ feels like you’re coming up.
VLURE’s long-awaited return arrives like a sunrise across a field after a festival night. It is a nostalgia-laden treasure to savour at the start of spring as summer starts to feel tantalisingly close. In a time where everything feels poised to unravel, VLURE have given us a lifeline in the form of an existential rave hymn; an anthem for a generation haunted by the past, heartbroken by the present, but still clinging, fiercely, to the promise of tomorrow.
I know this all sounds overblown, but the return of VLURE has genuinely brought optimism back to my day-to-day life. Built on the skeletal rush of 90s dance royalty (think Orbital, Faithless, Underworld) and lit by the neon pulse of friendship, grief and joy, ‘Better Days’ is pure escapism through nostalgia. Its spoken-word verses, delivered like poetry scrawled on the back of a club flyer, float atop a track that surges like MDMA in the bloodstream. “There are always better days,” Hamish Hutcheson repeats like a mantra, and in that moment, you believe him.
Photo by Weronika Sikora
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