Phoenix’s fifth album is an odd achievement: a confusing, willingly messy, blurry smorgasbord of indie-pop, electronic and stadium thrillers that somehow works as a finished product. Mixing reverberated, Beatles-like vocals with eighties keyboards and typically indie guitar, the band manages to produce something that is for the most part, exciting and enjoyable, albeit without being particularly new or refreshing to an oversaturated market.

Whilst their far more famous indie cousins, The Strokes, seem to owe a debt to Phoenix with their latest album Comedown Machine, Bankrupt! sounds remarkably like a more experimental version of The Strokes’ penultimate release Angles; an album that was released to a universal sigh from press and fans alike. Dialing up the keyboards and pop-factor, opening track ‘Entertainment’ hits almost all the highs that The Strokes missed. Remarkably catchy, it teases a stadium coda before promptly ending the song, leaving the listener begging for more; a wonderful album opener, and likely great live set starter. ‘SOS In Bel Air’ is reminiscent of fellow-French indie rocker M83, and songs like ‘Trying to Be Cool’ and ‘The Real Thing’ are delightfully balanced pop songs. These songs wear the resurgently chic A-Ha influence proudly, and would fit into any fashionably fussy Spotify playlist.

When the quiet synths of the title track kick in halfway through the album, its peculiarly wide range in styles becomes more apparent. The seven-minute (mostly instrumental) song simply shouldn’t work on an album of big hitters, but by breaking up the first and second halves it makes the album soar to somewhere else entirely. It is somewhat of a false dawn however. ‘Chloroform’ is pleasant and sweet but feels dated, and whilst ‘Don’t’ is another perfect pop song, final track ‘Oblique City’ begs for some Casablancas-esque vocal oomph in an album that fizzles out disappointingly from the promise given halfway. Bankrupt! becomes ever-more self-indulgent with frivolous sounds from the 1980s, rather than developing on the earlier pure pop or pseudo-orchestral pieces.

Bankrupt! is an album that constantly surprises and is anything but boring, but it does reek of ‘missed opportunity’ in terms of shaking up the stagnant indie market. In reality, this doesn’t matter that much: even in the weaker second-half the tracks are beyond merely acceptable and are fun tracks that deserve a play through during the dire exam term. Whether it will deserve replaying in years to come, however, is far less clear.