Temples Traded Their Guitars for a 90s Rave on 'Bliss'

For a decade Temples were the band you reached for when you wanted Britain's psych revival in its Sunday best. Big reverb, bigger hooks, a sound that pointed back to 1967 and was happy to stay there. Bliss, out June 26 on V2 Records, points somewhere else. The guitars step back. Synths and drum machines move to the front. The Kettering four-piece are chasing the late-90s and early-2000s dancefloor now, and they are not being shy about it.

Frontman James Bagshaw laid out the coordinates himself. The lead single "Jet Stream Heart" is, in his words, "Kylie Minogue, meets Daft Punk, meets Temples." He keeps name-checking Underworld, Faithless, Massive Attack and Portishead, and the phrase he reaches for to describe the mood is "melancholic euphoria." That last one is the useful tell. This is not a band finding the rave at 3am with its hands in the air. It is a band writing about the rave from the outside, nostalgic for a club scene they were too young to be part of. "We're nostalgic for a club scene that we weren't even a part of," Bagshaw told NME. You can hear that distance all over the record, and it is both the point and the problem.

The pivot, and who's driving it

"Jet Stream Heart" is the clearest argument for the turn. It commits. A steady pulse up front, the old psychedelic haze pushed into the corners instead of smeared across everything, a melody that does not apologise for wanting the floor. When Bliss sounds this certain, the reinvention reads as a real idea rather than a costume change.

Part of why it lands, and part of why the album wobbles, is who is at the desk. Temples produced this one themselves. Their last record, 2023's Exotico, was handled by Sean Ono Lennon, and going it alone clearly meant something to Bagshaw. "You're baring it all and you can feel very naked," he said. That cuts both ways. When the songs commit to the dancefloor, they sound like a band that knows exactly what it wants. When they hedge, you can hear four people talking themselves into a genre rather than living inside it.

Where it works, where it drifts

The critics have already split on this, and the split is the honest read. AllMusic found much of Bliss "too slick and too facile," even "surprisingly boring." Indie Is Not A Genre heard the opposite, an album where "there really isn't a bad track" and every song has an earworm tucked in it. Both reactions are fair, because the record swings between them.

It is best when it has a concrete feeling to chase. "Vendetta," which Bagshaw says came from falling out with a friend and the small relief of getting past it, is the kind of specific, human idea the album needs more of. When Bliss writes toward an actual emotion, it moves. When it settles for atmosphere, for a mood-board of Bristol in 1998, it drifts, and the back half is where that drift sets in. Ten tracks, from "Jet Stream Heart" to the closing "Fantasy Realm," and you can feel the ones built on a real idea pulling ahead of the ones built on a reference.

The verdict

The reinvention is real and mostly earned. Temples have not embarrassed themselves chasing the dancefloor, which is more than a lot of guitar bands manage when they reach for the drum machine. Bliss is at its best when the club is a feeling to write toward, not a look to put on, and it does not always get there. But the swing is the right one, and the singles are strong enough to make the next move matter. Bagshaw has already promised that next single will be "the ultra shock to the senses." On this evidence, that threat is worth taking seriously.