10 Greatest Forgotten Songs Of The 2000s
3. Hard-Fi - Tied Up Too Tight
The UK indie boom of the mid-’00s saw a multitude of bands of wildly disparate success. For every Arctic Monkeys, there are umpteen Rakes, Rifles, and other groups whose star burned bright(ish) but fast.
One band who often didn’t get their due at the time, and who aren’t often discussed these days, are Hard-Fi. Throwing back to ‘90s Britain rather than ‘00s New York, they stood out from the pack with brash swagger, but could put a thoughtful song together much better than plenty of their contemporaries.
Perhaps the best track is Tied Up Too Tight, a state of the nation anthem with a catchy chorus and a sense of real menace that I Predict a Riot, Kaiser Chiefs’ tune on similar subject lines, couldn’t come close to. Hard-Fi tended towards the explicit for their subject matter - they weren’t would-be beat poets like some of their more embarrassing contemporaries, they wrote good honest songs about being broke and getting drunk.
Hard-Fi were no flash in the pan, and their first two albums hopped genres with a lot more ambition than many would give them credit for. The whole run is worth revisiting, and this is a great place to start.