Loyalty to Loyalty by Cold War Kids

Loyalty to Loyalty, Cold War Kids' second album, came out on Downtown in September 2008, after the Long Beach band had spent the rest of 2007 on the road across North America and Europe behind Robbers & Cowards. They took four months to make it, borrowed the title from a paper by the American philosopher Josiah Royce, and came back darker and stranger.

Nathan Willett's yowl still leads the way over his piano and guitar, with Jonnie Russell's guitar and keys, Matt Maust's bass and Matt Aveiro's drums rattling around him, but the arrangements wander further out and the subject matter gets heavy: suicide, crises of faith, public security, whether a job can ever really satisfy. Critics liked a lot of it and grumbled that it was uneven. "Something Is Not Right With Me", a jittery piano stomper, was the single that stuck, landing at number 38 in Triple J's Hottest 100 for 2008, and "I've Seen Enough" followed.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.