With their latest single “Last One to The Post,” Dublin natives The WU offer a heart-wrenching ode to summers past, those golden nights when everything felt forever, the park was your domain, and all you had in this world were the friendships surrounding you.
The song plays initially as a drive-through memory with the window open. Between the jangling guitar lines of Daniel Brady, the steady undercurrent of Ciaran White’s bass, and the punchy rhythm of Daniel Kearns’ drums, there’s something of a spark of familiarity, something refreshing. The WU, formerly the Weather Underground, has long been acknowledged for their DIY ethos and energy in live shows, but here they achieve something more profound, the sound of time slipping through your fingers. The production is clean as if the band wasn’t aiming to shine up memories, but to pull it up like a banner, with all its ruffled edges and glory. It feels lived-in, like the tales at its center. There is an honest joy in how the band can weigh down that feeling of reflection under forward motion, you can almost see a crowd of sweaty bodies singing the chorus back at them, smiling at their shared history.
What makes the single so captivating is how it manages to straddle eras, it conveys the punchy grit of The Strokes and Libertines, while tipping its hat at the sharp melodies of The Who and The Kinks. But once again, true to form, The WU let their own character seep into the mix and subtly touch upon their heterogeneous inspiration, from the jazz-like openness to the intimacy of folk, and Words never really sounds like a pastiche. Instead, it pulses with authenticity.
“Last One to The Post” is a love letter to childhood friendships, the sort that are forged on football pitches and street corners, where the laughter echoed long after the sun went down behind the rooftops. It’s a song full of mischief, warmth, and that tug that those days can’t quite be repeated, only remembered.