Song of the Day 1/24: The Vaccines, “If You Wanna”
Editor’s note: I’ve been under the weather — a kidney stone hailstorm — so Nathan Arizona has agreed to handle the Song of the Day for a spell.
The vaccine is finally here. The Vaccines have already been here a while, since their debut a decade ago. The post-punk indie guitar band from the UK plays the kind of energetic music that can push thoughts of Covid to the sidelines.
This song is from 2011, when the Vaccines were one of the hottest rock bands in Britain; an appearance of the David Letterman show added to the early buzz. Their kind of music fell out of favor later in the decade, but is now undergoing a revival. The Vaccines never went away like some of the other bands and have a new album coming out this year.
The media sometimes called these guitar groups the “The” bands: The Kooks, the Cribs, the Young Knives, the Libertines, the Horrors, the Courteeners, the Maccabees, the View, the Subways.
This trend started the first time after the Strokes from America launched a revival of snappy, garagey, somewhat retro rock in a world of nu-metal and slower, dreamy tunes (think Coldplay). The style had lost favor a decade or so later; nothing new can last long in the trendy world of British music. But then no former trend can go without a revival there either.
The Vaccines may have started during the first phase, but they have stayed popular enough to get in on the new version. Survival’s what it’s all about these days.
