Robbie Williams: Britpop review – a wayward and winning time machine’s journey back to the 90s | music

TThe arrival of Robbie Williams’ thirteenth studio album has been a complicated business. It was announced in May 2025 and was supposed to be released in October, when its title chimed in with the ’90s nostalgia sparked by the Oasis reunion. Williams spent the summer engaging in promotion, unveiling fake Britpop-themed blue billboards around London and organizing a press conference at the Groucho Club. There was a launch party at popular Camden venue Dingwalls, where he performed not only his new album in full, but also his 1997 solo debut Life Thru a Lens.

It was a bold choice, given that Life Thru a Lens had initially threatened to derail his solo career: at the time, the now-apparent supernova hits of Angels and Let Me Entertain You were overlooked while people criticized Williams’s muddled attempts to conform to Britpop. On stage at Dingwalls, he surprisingly announced that the album wouldn’t be released until mid-February, frankly admitting that he didn’t want to compete with Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. Now it has suddenly appeared, without explanation, two weeks into January: perhaps because Williams will have fewer rivals in this week’s album chart, giving him a greater chance of breaking the record he currently holds jointly with The Beatles for the most UK albums ever.

It’s all a bit weird, but the Britpop album itself feels weird. Williams described it as “the album I wanted to make when I left Take That” and a celebration of “the golden age of British music”. However, you wonder why he would want to return to the mid-90s, a time when he was lost, in the grip of addiction, and subject to so much unpleasant public ridicule, completely unaware that he was about to become the biggest British artist of his time. You could suggest it’s a closing act, but you might reasonably have thought that Williams had a finale when he released Angels: one of the most played songs on UK radio over the following year; A song so ubiquitous that it “knocked Wonderwall out of the national psyche,” as John Harris put it in British pop history The Last Party, and its success signals an apparent sea change in popular tastes away from at least the supposed alternative to the unabashed mainstream. Certainly the number of suitors for Williams’ subsequent solo work was far greater than the number of artists the music press expected to rule 1998: The Seminar, Ultrasound, Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s old band, The Warm Jets.

So what’s going on here? At first, you get the impression that Williams thinks his work is unfinished with the sound he initially sought as a confused former boy band member, and returns to it with the confidence of a man who has sold 75 million records and could call on Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi on opener Rocket. It doesn’t always work out – Cocky’s annoying charm sounds like Oasis, but alas, Oasis is more about fetish chemistry than definitely maybe – but when it does, Britpop makes Williams’ plan seem like a good idea. There’s no doubt who influenced the vocal tone of “All My Life,” with its vowels pulled into multiple syllables, or the wall of distorted guitars in “Spies.” Like Liam Gallagher’s 2019 solo track Once and One of Us, Spies takes a wistful look at mid-’90s hedonism: “We’d stay up all night, thinking we were all spies, praying tomorrow wouldn’t come.” But there’s a swagger and brilliance to the tunes that transforms these songs beyond the realm of convention, and the results are quite enjoyable.

Just as you think you’ve got the general idea of ​​the album, it unfolds. There’s Morrissey, a somewhat sarcastic and homogeneous paean to the former Smiths singer co-written by Gary Barlow, which, if nothing else, wins points for sheer improbability. There’s “It’s Okay ‘Til the Drugs Stop Working,” a song that, melodically, at least, sounds remarkably like the British pop that briefly flourished in the charts between the end of the 1960s and the rise of glamour: White Plains County, Christy, and Butterscotch, not artists anyone would have expected to write an album review in 2026. And there’s “Human,” a beautiful, slinky electronic song about artificial intelligence, featuring the Mexican pop duo Jesse & Joy (of… Williams is a very big deal in Mexico, where 2005’s Intensive Care remains the eighth best-selling album of all time) as well as Coldplay’s Chris Martin on guitar and keys. It might be the best song here, but how it relates to the concept of Britpop is anyone’s guess, as synthpop songs about artificial intelligence were pretty thin on the ground in the mid-90s.

However, whether conceptually sound or not, Britpop is no less attractive at all. The only thing it doesn’t have is a track that might have the same impact as Angels or Let Me Entertain You, which leaves it in an odd position. This may be the album Robbie Williams wanted to make when he left Take That. Likewise, he should be very glad he didn’t do it.

Alexis listened this week to

Daphne – Talk to me
Dan Snaith returns to his dancefloor-focused alias, effortlessly conjuring a hypnotic, trippy 3am mood. Heavy video is also impressive.