Astrolites: Play For Keeps

Swedish rockabilly cool cats.

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Firmly fixated on girls, tattoos, hot rods, girls, booze and girls, Astrolites have pretty much got the essence of rock’n’roll down pat.

Dubbing themselves ‘high-speed rockabilly’ (is there any other kind?), they spend most of this album living up to their own billing. They kick into opener Chop Top ’49 with such hunger and aggression that there’s a danger things might slip downhill thereafter.

Fortunately, the twangy, reverb-drenched mayhem just keeps tumbling out of the speakers at breakneck pace. The only mis-step is an oddly plodding cover of Johnny Horton’s I’m Coming Home.

Apart from that, this is authentically retro and sounds like it ought to be the soundtrack to a bar-room brawl.

Essi Berelian

Whether it’s magazines, books or online, Essi has been writing about rock ’n’ metal for around thirty years. He has been reviews editor for Classic Rock and Metal Hammer, rock reviews editor for lads mag Front and worked for Kerrang!. He has also written the Rough Guide to Heavy Metal and contributed to the Rough Guide to Rock and Rough Guide Book of Playlists, and the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles (13th edition). Most fun interview? Tenacious D – Jack Black and Kyle Gass – for The Pick of Destiny movie book. An avid record/CD/tape collector, he’s amassed more music than he could ever possibly listen to, which annoys his wife no end.