MOSES’ sophomore album, I Still Believe! Do You? (2022) doesn’t ask the question as much as it issues a challenge. The London-based outfit, helmed by the irrepressible Victor Moses, 2020 debut, Almost Everything Is Bullshit, was a tangle of sweat-drenched guitars. Two years later, their follow-up record refines and dares to push things further. Known for their high-energy shows and emotionally charged anthems, MOSES will return to Control Club on March 1, 2025.
The title isn’t coy. This is a record of conviction in love, art, and oneself. But belief here isn’t the quiet, meditative kind; it’s a breath held tight in the chest. Recorded at Wolverhampton’s Magic Garden Studios with Gavin Monaghan (Editors, The Twang), the album retains the band’s bluster but introduces something grander in ambition.
Move On kicks things off with Victor's vocals climbing to a wail. “This road in my way, it’s my whole life,” he sings. The track owes something to the slow-burn dramatics of early Foals, though where Antidotes was mathematical, I Still Believe! Do You? is all instinct. Mad (About My Dreams) is another restless song. There’s a nod to Britpop swagger in it, hints of The Stone Roses and Modern Life Is Rubbish-era Blur. It’s one of the many moments where the band feels like they’re chasing an unnameable need.
This feeling of pursuit runs through the record. Happy Birthday Payday is an anthem of exasperation, its lyrics side-eyeing the nine-to-five grind that keeps dreams at bay. “Dreams are for the lazy ones, right?” Moses sneers. It’s an old frustration, but MOSES does it without posturing. They believe it. And they make you believe it, too.
But the album isn’t all fire and fury. The Last Kick of Melancholia is a centerpiece, sprawling and operatic, a song that unfolds in movements. It pulls from the grand tradition of British rock theatricality—the bombast of The Who, the shape-shifting storytelling of The Kinks—but channels it through something more immediate. Alone is the album at its rawest, with Moses’ voice balancing on the edge screaming. If most of the record is about belief as a driving force, Alone lingers on what happens when that belief falters.
Thematically, I Still Believe! Do You? about holding fast when everything tells you to let go. The final track, I Still Believe, is the last gasp of a prizefighter refusing to stay down.
There’s no winking at the audience, no layers of postmodern distance with MOSES. They mean all this. If the band asks, “Do you still believe?” it’s not rhetorical. It’s an invitation.
