Fun: Some Nights album

Inside Track Emerging New York-based alternative rock band fun has burst onto the music scene with their popular song ‘We are Young’, which topped the charts for six weeks straight, and propelled the band into mainstream success. The band consists of three members: Nate Ruess as the lead singer, Andrew Dost and Jack Antonoff. They came up with the name ‘fun’ when one of the band members suggested ‘Ice-cream’. ‘That was a terrible one,’ said Nate. ‘So I was like, “I like the image that it conjures up. What about fun?”’ This is fun’s second album, and you’ll be surprised at the range of songs on the album – it’s clear that they don’t want to be pigeon-holed into one genre!

Quotable lyrics
And now all my loves have come back to haunt me
my regrets in texts sent to taunt me
i never claimed to be more than a one night stand and oh
I’ve given everyone I know
a good reason to go
and I came back with the belief
that everyone I love is gonna leave me

Key Tracks
It’s so hard to pick, but my personal favourites are ‘Some Nights’ and ‘Some Nights Intro’ for their Queen-like sound, and ‘We Are Young’ is a familiar favourite and great to dance to after too many glasses of wine! I love ‘Carry On’ for its surprising chorus that you won’t see coming for the first minute of the song, and ‘All Alright’ for its marching-band beat.

Sound off
Fun has been repeatedly compared to Queen, especially in the ‘Some Nights Intro’, for their use of theatrical opera, and in the spoken-word sections in ‘Some Nights’. The album is laced with contradictions: it is part commercial bubblegum-pop that one can expect to hear performed in Glee (in fact, ‘We Are Young’ was!) but it also has an alternative indie-rock quality about it. The track ‘It gets better’ seems awfully teenage romcom, and yet all the album’s songs are clever – the lyrics are good and the range of instruments and sounds used is incredible: from the children’s choir in ‘All Alright’, to the unexpected techno-voice change in ‘Some Nights’. Every song will intrigue and surprise you.

The song ‘Some Nights’ (which the album is named after) has recently been released.

If you like this, try Grouplove’s album Never trust a happy song, or Queen’s Greatest Hits compilation album.