Cast have been moving from strength to strength in the second half of their career, especially bolstered after a support tour with Oasis last year. Not stopping for a second after releasing 2024’s Love Is The Call, their latest album, Yeah Yeah Yeah, is their eighth studio album.
Yeah Yeah Yeah is just another notch in their repertoire, and what it may lack in innovation, it makes up for in heart. Cast clearly knows what they are doing. The album’s opening track, ‘Poison Vine’ oozes with Britpop fanfare: the ever-ascending bass line; the muddled, messy vocals at the song’s crescendo, and the works. It’s only January, and Cast look set to sneak their way into stadium soundtracks across the UK.
It would be remiss not to complement John Power’s vocals, which, if anything, have gotten higher over the last 30 years. It goes without saying that the post-production is a far cry better than Cast’s most defining and well-known album, All Change, and adds a good deal of the fanfare that makes Yeah Yeah Yeah’s opening few tracks well-suited for the stadiums. ‘Calling Out Your Name’ and ‘Free Love’ are springy, feel-good anthems, but the middle of the album sees a slight tonal change. ‘Say Something New’ takes things back a notch, but not as much as they could have. It might be Cast’s infectiously positive and enlightening style, but ‘Say Something New’ feels like the lyrics and instruments were written for two separate songs. Power’s lyrics of: “Time to live and / Time’s are tight and / Time to ask these questions ‘why?’’ fall slightly askew with Liam “Skin” Tyson’s guitarmanship.
Though the record mostly plays things safe, Cast season their sixth track ‘Way It’s Gotta
Be’ with a slight dash of funk. The main riff is immediately arresting, and whilst the culminations of this experimentation don’t quite land, it was refreshing to see the Britpop icons cast their net further afield. ‘Devil and the Deep’ feels like Nashville-meets-Liverpool, and was a standout track on the album. The stripped-back combination of the thudding acoustic and the droning wails of the guitar in the background is the perfect backdrop for the track’s narrative. ‘Devil and the Deep’ is a song that should not be lost amongst the fanfare of much of the rest of the album.
Speaking of fanfare, ‘Weight of the World’ brings some zeal back into the album, but at the expense of originality. Perhaps owing to its appearance at the tail-end of the album, it starts to feel like you’ve heard the same track a couple of times already. Unfortunately, nothing is arresting about ‘Weight of the World’ to differentiate it from the opening tracks. Despite the rocky ride to get there, the final track, ‘Birds Heading South,’ sticks the landing for the album. It is an unapologetic swayer, complete with a beautiful Tyson guitar solo.
At the end of the day, Cast may not be at the forefront of musical originality, but arguably, they
don’t need to be. They stand as a bastion of one of the UK’s most defining musical eras, and still have the chops to back it up. Yeah Yeah Yeah is a nostalgic slice of the mid-90s that’s wormed its way into 2026. Whilst it certainly isn’t musically innovative and garishly positive at times, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.
