While it’s not the last song you’ll be seeing from The Futureheads on here, ‘Robot’ is definitely the last representative from the band’s 2004 debut that’ll get its own dedicated post. Me and that self-titled album go a long way back. It’s a story I told in the very first post of this series, which boils down to ‘my mum got it for me at Tesco’. I knew of ‘Decent Days and Nights’, and ‘Hounds of Love’ had probably been out as a single at that point. I can’t remember, it’s all so long ago. But when I saw that CD on the shelf, I do feel like I sort of grabbed at it without any hesitation. Whatever was in that small pea-brain of mine told me that it was an album worth having.

It was. I still have that same copy sitting on the shelf in my room. The ring holding the CD in the case is busted, and was from the day I got it, but it was the music that counted at the end of the day. If you don’t know The Futureheads, they were a part of the big post-punk revival boom that was going on in the mid-2000s. What I think set them apart from a lot of those other groups were their knack for some glorious harmonies and fantastic countermelodies, all while still delivering some chunky, raw performances. The album’s first track ‘Le Garage’ introduces all this, and it carries on in follow-up ‘Robot’. The track’s only two minutes long, but they manage to pack all the goodness in there.

The meaning behind ‘Robot’ is quite simple. It’s from the perspective of a robot, who knows what they are, what they’re programmed to do, knows how long they live for. This robot seems to be happy with this existence, in service to the human race. That is until the song’s final moments where it begins to question why it doesn’t have a mind, begins to malfunction and then stops working. At least that’s what I get from the looping riff and sudden stop that close out the track. I enjoy this one quite a bit. As the album’s second track, it keeps the momentum of the record’s opening moments rolling. It’s only two minutes long too, so nothing to dwell upon, you know? Just a few verses and choruses and then it’s done and onto the next one. I’ll always appreciate this album. Don’t think it got better than it for the band, but there are still a couple tracks from albums that followed that I can always get behind. Those are for days far from now.