Single heralds a promising and unique new album for Archive.
Taken directly from the fourth studio album, 'Fuck U' is the innovative, extrovert and brilliant debut single for their new album 'Noise'. The single itself promises very high standards for he rest of the album, carrying with it the words 'emotional', 'colourful' and 'subtle' yet powerfully explosive. Archive proves that screaming and heavily overdriven guitars are not always the way forward when displaying distaste or hatred. Here, Archive quite clearly make a point with an almost acoustic version of music that can only be described as being innovative and borderline industrial, although pinning Archive's sound down to just one genre is incredibly hard due to it's many influences.
Prolific, creative and forged in a frenzy of strained emotions, the band refine their horizons with fantastic flair and control, bringing in exquisite baroque sounding keyboards that smooth textures and timbres together like fruit in a blender. The song uses a gentle electronic backdrop that sounds vaguely nostalgic; soaring back to an 80's style groove so mellow that it emphasises wholly the real contradiction in the lyrics. It would be best to describe this single as Archive's finger to the world, both in general and towards all those bands that stick to growling and grunting their way through their songs like disgruntled pigs to make their point and make their hurting known. 'Fuck U' even sounds like it is mocking this trend within music purely through the sheer prestige sound that Archive create. Instead of screaming and wailing their woes to the world, Archive take a more creative and inventive path of sound whose influences may border upon the easily recognisable and well loved vindictiveness of Nine Inch Nails and the melancholic yet sinister purring of Deftones.
'Fuck U' is a bitter lyrical pill that calms and soothes like a storm yet grates and flows as violently as the heaviest of Hardcore metal bands. Repetitive, heavy with electronic layering adding a drum loop here, a touch of synth and dream dust there, 'Fuck U' moves like a room of mirrors, the sound layers constantly reflecting, distorting and mutating to become something else. 'Fuck U' is truly innovative and most certainly the most creative form of saying something so crude and simple ever to have graced the music scene. A truly magnificent single to represent a promising album.