On October 14, Northern Irish indie rock group Two Door Cinema Club released their third studio album, “Gameshow”. This album comes a long four years after their last album, “Beacon”, which showed little improvement from their debut album, 2010’s “Tourist History”.

“Gameshow” offers something new that I haven’t seen before out of this band, a type of disco feel. The first single from this album, “Bad Decisions,” sounds like something out of a Bee Gees album from the ‘70s.

My favorite song on this album is “Lavender,” which reminds me of stereotypical, classic, Two Door Cinema Club music. Something that stood out to me from the release of this album is that lead singer Alex Trimble has showed little maturation in terms of his vocals. For example, if you were potentially to have someone who had never heard of TDCC in the past listen to his vocals from 2010 compared to 2016, I don’t believe that they would be able to determine which sample came earlier.

Trimble is 27 now, and even though he was just 20 when “Tourist History” was released, I think that his control of his own voice was actually stronger when he was younger. After listening to “Gameshow” several times in its entirety, I still think that “Tourist History” is in fact the group’s best work to date. It’s not that “Gameshow” is bad, it’s just that “Tourist History” set the bar really high when the young band released it in 2010, and with the long intervals between albums, it makes me question how much time was actually spent working on these albums, given the quality of them.
“Gameshow” has 12 songs, one more than the 11 songs released on both “Tourist History” and “Beacon,” and that slight increase might be the only improvement that I can see coming from this album. Overall, “Gameshow” is not terrible by any means. It’s just a little disappointing, considering that fans have been waiting four years for TDCC to drop it. The tone is bleak, and the lyrics seem thrown together and meaningless. I’m giving this album a mediocre “C,” and I’m starting to lose interest in the band that I had enjoyed quite enthusiastically in the past.