TC TENET’s new single, “Animals,” arrives with the sort of confident thud you’d expect from a well-aimed Doc Marten hitting a hollow stage. This isn’t background music for tidying your sock drawer, unless your sock drawer is a portal to a field at 3 AM where everyone’s forgotten their own name but remembers every chord. It’s a full-throated roar into the now, a soundtrack for when the civilized veneer cracks just enough to let the genuine out.
The track champions that electrifying hum of pure, unadulterated presence, particularly when shared. It’s about becoming part of a pulsating, almost sacred space where past anxieties are simply shown the door, no polite apologies needed. There’s a muscularity here, an echo of that late 90s alt-rock swagger – think the coiled energy of early Radiohead tussling with the brute force of Queens of the Stone Age, perhaps, but filtered through something that’s stared down a few more modern demons.
And that guitar, oh, it’s a bright, snarling thing, underscored by a backbeat that feels like a collective heartbeat. It reminds me, quite unexpectedly, of the specific, almost metallic tang of the air just before a massive summer thunderstorm, that charged feeling when everything is about to break wide open. The raw, honest vocals claw at you, unpolished in a way that feels utterly deliberate, like a conscious decision to unlearn prettiness in favour of truth.
“Animals” isn’t about being merely feral; it’s about a chosen wildness, a collective exhalation of ‘to hell with yesterday’s expectations.’ It paints a picture not of chaos, but of a vivid, breathing tapestry of shared breath and sound, where the only currency is the thrum of the bass in your sternum. TC TENET sings like someone who’s just remembered how to breathe after holding it for far too long, achieving a strange, beautiful exhaustion within the joy.
It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? If we all shed our carefully constructed selves for just one night, what kind of glorious, howling symphony might we make?
