There’s something fitting about Hovercraft being from Grimsby — a port town, wind-lapped, unpolished, where grit isn’t an aesthetic, it’s just the air you breathe. Their new record On The Rocks carries has landed in my lap today so let’s take a look.
The album cracks open with Anytime, a track that moves like someone’s kicked open the pub door and stumbled into a chorus before shaking the rain off their coat. Love follows with the kind of bittersweet sincerity that could soundtrack a seaside arcade closing for winter — genuine, yearning, not trying too hard, which is exactly why it works.
Superman has ambitions bigger than its budget, its a tad Fleetwood Mac, Im really enjoying the record, its smooth, there’s something inherently very Hovercraft about reaching for the sky, even if your feet absolutely stay on the ground.
Bring My Baby Back and My Own Little World is where the songwriting muscle starts to show — tight, sentimental without going syrupy, hooks doing the heavy work here. Keep It Together flirts with the listener somehow, the vocal on this is very accomplished. Indie Kid kicks off with a trumpet, its ace, its the kinda tune you get ready to on a Friday night.
Then Bob Bob Bob arrives — daft, repetitive, suspiciously brilliant. It’s either genius or complete nonsense, and the band are clever enough to leave you arguing about it. Crazy brings back the emotional centre of gravity, White Limousine swaggering in behind it like it’s sneaking onto a Libertines B-side compilation. There’s confidence there, but also the sense Hovercraft hasn’t yet cranked the volume on their own personality quite loud enough.
Sweet Thing leans into the heart-on-sleeve romance of 90s indie without cosplay nostalgia, and Baby Blue closes the record with a tender shrug — the kind that says, yeah, maybe we’re dreamers, but at least we showed up.
What makes On The Rocks genuinely interesting is its backstory — written in 1996, reconstructed via AI in 2025 — a sort of indie-pop Ship of Theseus. It never sounds like pastiche, but it also refuses to sound shiny-modern. It exists in its own smudged polaroid timeline, somewhere between pub backroom gig flyers, early internet forum tears, and songs you’d burn to CD-R with too many feelings attached to them.
Could it be tighter in places? Absolutely. Some hooks drift when they could punch, some tracks daydream when a shake of the shoulders would do them good. The album’s personality is charming, but you can almost see a bolder, sharper version of Hovercraft pacing around in the margins, waiting to fully walk into frame.
Still — there’s heart here, and importantly, heart with mileage. This isn’t surgically clean indie pop manufactured for sync deals and pastel playlists. This is human, fuzzy around the edges, occasionally too earnest for its own good, but with a warmth and sincerity that makes you root for it even in its wonkier moments.
Hovercraft mean it. You can hear it in every scuffed chord and every unfiltered sigh. And that, more than anything, is their ticket out of port.
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