With frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist spitting “Everyone’s a little fucking bitch and I’m gettick sick and tired of it”, Enough Is Enough kicks off The Hives’ latest album with pure passion and attitude. The Hives Forever Forever The Hives proves the band have zero interest in mellowing out or reinventing themselves, sounding exactly like they did two decades ago, but sharper and leaner.

The band’s secret weapon is fun, and you can hear them dancing through every strum and snare hit, playing manic, sweaty rock and roll in the simplest tradition. Paint A Picture charges out fast and euphoric before collapsing into a slower, fist-bumping chorus, and it feels gleefully alive in an era where most bands play to click-tracks. The closer The Hives Forever Forever The Hives is one of the all-time great rock album finales, a delirious confetti-canon-ready celebration of a life lived loud, both ridiculous and strangely profound. This is not an an album with any subtlety or experimentation, and at half an hour long without a single ballad to break the momentum, it might just cement The Hives as the best straight-ahead rock and roll band on the planet right now. The album feels like a deliberate stand against pretension. While so many of their peers chose to “mature” by slowing down or polishing themselves into safer forms of indie, The Hives have doubled down on the dumbest and most joyful aspects of rock, sharpening their attack until it gleams. Two decades on, they’ve outlived the hype cycle that surrounded them, distilling their identity into its most stripped-back, entertaining form, and in doing so they’ve become a kind of standard-bearer for how to age in rock and roll without losing the swagger. The choruses may be dumb slogans, but there’s real power in shouting them at the top of your lungs. Revelling in the simple act of making noise together, The Hives just kept doing what they do better than anyone else, not evolving because they never had to.