The arrival of Robbie Williams’s 13th album has been a complicated business. It was announced in May 2025 and was supposed to come out in October, when its title would have chimed with the 90s nostalgia sparked by the Oasis reunion. Williams spent the summer engaging in promotion, unveiling fake Britpop-themed blue plaques around London and staging a press conference at the Groucho Club. There was a launch gig at storied Camden venue Dingwalls, at which he performed not just his new album in full, but his 1997 solo debut Life Thru a Lens.
It was a bold choice, given that Life Thru a Lens initially threatened to derail his solo career: at the time, the now nakedly obvious supernova hits Angels and Let Me Entertain You were overlooked while people criticised Williams’s muddled attempts to fit in with, well, Britpop. On stage at Dingwalls, he made the surprise announcement that the album now wasn’t coming out until mid-February, admitting with winning candour that he didn’t want to compete with Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Now it’s suddenly appeared, without explanation, two weeks into January: presumably because Williams will have fewer competitors in the albums chart this week, giving him a greater chance at breaking the record he currently jointly holds with the Beatles for the most UK No 1 albums ever.
It is all a little strange, but then the Britpop album itself feels peculiar. Williams has trailed it as “the album I wanted to make when I left Take That” and a celebration of “a golden age for British music”. Yet you wonder why he would want to revisit the mid-90s, a time when he was lost, in the grip of addiction, subject to a lot of pretty unpleasant public mockery, completely unaware that he was about to become the biggest British artist of his era. You could suggest it’s an act of closure, but you might reasonably have thought Williams got closure when he released Angels: one of the most-played songs on UK radio over the next year; a song so ubiquitous that it “evicted Wonderwall from the national psyche”, as John Harris put it in his Britpop history The Last Party, its success suggestive of a distinct sea change in popular tastes away from the at least putatively alternative to the unashamedly mainstream. Certainly, there were substantially more takers for Williams’s subsequent solo work than for the artists the music press predicted would rule 1998: Symposium, Ultrasound, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s old band theaudience, and the Warm Jets.
So what is going on here? Initially, you get the impression that Williams thinks he has unfinished business with the sound he initially pursued as a confused ex-boyband member, returning to it with the confidence of a man who has sold 75m records and can call upon Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi for opener Rocket. It doesn’t always work – the ungainly glam of Cocky sounds like Oasis, but alas Oasis circa Heathen Chemistry rather than Definitely Maybe – but when it does, Britpop makes Williams’ plan seem a good idea. There’s no mistaking who influenced the vocal intonation of All My Life, with its vowels drawled into multiple syllables, or the wall of distorted guitars on Spies. Like Liam Gallagher’s 2019 solo tracks Once and One of Us, Spies casts a ruefully nostalgic eye over mid-90s hedonism: “We used to stay up all night, thinking we were all spies, praying that tomorrow won’t come.” But there’s a swagger and sparkle to the melodies that shift these songs past the realm of pastiche, and the results are hugely enjoyable.
Just as you think you’ve got the general idea of the album, it unravels. There is Morrissey, a jokey, faintly homoerotic synth-pop paean to the former Smiths frontman co-authored by Gary Barlow, which, if nothing else, wins points for sheer improbability. There is It’s OK Until the Drugs Stop Working, a track that, melodically, at least, sounds remarkably like the British bubblegum pop that briefly flourished in the charts between the end of the 60s and the rise of glam: the province of White Plains, Christie and Butterscotch, not artists anyone writing an album review in 2026 might reasonably have expected to invoke. And there is Human, a beautiful, lambent electronic ballad about AI, featuring Mexican pop duo Jesse & Joy (Williams is famously a very big deal in Mexico, where 2005’s Intensive Care remains the eighth biggest-selling album of all time) as well as Coldplay’s Chris Martin on guitar and keys. It might be the best song here, but what it has to do with the Britpop concept is anyone’s guess, lambent synth-pop songs about AI having been pretty thin on the ground in the mid-90s.
Still, conceptually sound or not, Britpop is never less than engaging. The one thing it doesn’t have is a track that might conceivably have the same impact as Angels or Let Me Entertain You, which leaves it in an odd position. It may well be the album Robbie Williams wanted to make when he left Take That. Equally, he must be incredibly glad that he didn’t.
This week Alexis listened to
Daphni – Talk to Me
Dan Snaith returns to his dancefloor-focused alias, effortlessly conjures up hypnotic, tripped-out 3am mood. Impressively cat-heavy video, too.
