- The Grates might have been quiet on the musical front since the release of 2011’s Secret Rituals, but they’ve been plenty busy opening Morningside’s rad Southside Tea Room café, lending their expertise and recording space to younger Brisbane bands, and getting bloody married. You might think this would breed a more mature fourth record. Instead, however, they’ve totally let loose.

This was clear from the very first taste of Dream Team: single Holiday Home, which has got a riff DZ Deathrays could be proud of, and a bratty chorus of “I like to light fires on the weekend”. Patience Hodgson’s voice is both scrappy and soaring in the most Corinne Tucker-ish performance on the record, which might seem like a cheap comparison considering the amount of Riot Grrl that screams through this album, but the strikingly similar way both artists can pin you to the wall with their voices -and the love-it-or-hate-it response this provokes- is pretty undeniable. The short and sweet 7/11 brings plenty of fun, Brisbane heavy lyrics, and the closest thing to this band’s early sugar-rush pop. That they follow it up with the spare grungeness of Dirty Hands, a screeching, Violent Soho-esque rock song, makes a pretty strong statement about the kind of band The Grates wanna be in 2014.

The first half of Dream Team is so raucus and packed full of riffs and yelps and great lines and action that it’s understandable when the pace wanes a bit on the second, but there’s still plenty in the closing tracks to like. I’m Staying drags a bit, but it’s also Hodgson’s most straightforwardly beautiful vocal performance. Friends With Scum is down-the-line punk that I can already tell is gonna be the song I skip on repeat listens, but I can also imagine it really going off in their live set. While the pacing of the second half is also quite weird, with punk tracks next to sad surf ballads like What’s Wrong With You, they close strong with Back to Back which is raw and stripped back at the start before building to a heavy rock song loaded with feelings and fuzz. Dream Team sounds more like a first album than a fourth, but I think by now we’ve had enough ruminations on family life from pop artists running out of passion for pop music. It’s great to see a band just go ‘eff that’ and make a frantic and fresh album packed with influences that they obviously love, not caring too much how it’s going to be received.

- Madeleine Laing.