While Night Driver was an interesting sonic diversion, Half Way There gets back to doing what the band does best. or strips away any deeper conversation surrounding climate change or the state of the world on Race To Mars. The chorus of this track is at the very top of the band’s catalogue and guarantees multiple repeat listens as the trio’s vocals wriggle and thrive between your ears.

James Bourne, Charlie Simpson and Matt Willis approached the project with a simple goal in mind: “How do we make the ultimate Busted album? Busted are a totally schooling in lazy formulaic songwriting in ‘Half Way There’ and sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s charming but mostly it’s just annoying. I cannot wait for fans to hear this record and to be able to talk to them on social media about it,” says Willis.There’s something refreshing about listening to a pop band that isn’t trying to conform with what is charting well and just doing what they want. And that’s exactly what the lads have done with this exceptional, exhilarating and at times moving album. The ‘ Year 3000’-esque ‘ Shipwrecked in Atlantis’ delivers another fantastical flight of fancy, while ‘ Race to Mars’ takes a look at the space race in a tribute to Elon Musk and Tesla, and once again taps into the band’s penchant for a pop culture reference or two in its lyrics.

The band recorded a new version featuring Simpson and without McFly for the album, as the band believed that it fit the album's themes of nostalgia, reflection, and their hearkening back to their earlier pop-punk sound due to the lyrics dealing with James Bourne's life after Busted initially broke up in 2005. They have written more material than ever before, with much of it penned in Bourne’s North London apartment, which also happens to be where they spent a lot of time together when they first formed the band in 2000. Elsewhere on the album Reunion is a peppy beat-driven moment, Shipwrecked in Atlantis is a pure pop-rock rush, and MIA is the kind of track that will fill an arena live while fans hold up their phone lights and sway along. The rockiest moment on the album comes on the storming Nostalgia, which suggests that a more straightforward rock album could be in the band’s future.Busted will hit the road on a major tour across the UK in March 2019 in support of their fourth album ‘Half Way There’, due out for release on 08 February 2019. In that song’s chorus lyric ‘Where d’ya go, I’d be lost without you / It’s crazy, time moves slow / I ain’t seen you on the TV lately’, they all deliver the vocal with feeling and there’s a sense that in this version of the song, they’ve communicated the problems that ended their juggernaut of success so abruptly and got closure on that time to move forward to this new chapter. Even back when the pop-rock and pop-punk they were so mercenarily emulating, it was telling that Busted always remained firmly in the boyband territory; the sound wasn’t that far from the genuine article in the early 2000s, but both musicianship and lyricism that drew from territory spanning from base to outright stupid was always a heavy implication of the pop machinations behind the scenes to make that sound even more marketable.

Busted seem to take a lot of music that was popular with teenagers ten years ago and kinda lazily mash it together with this track. As we touched on in our review of this album’s first single ‘Nineties’ back in November, Busted have never been most pop bands, even by their own admission. I first fell in love with this song when it was originally on MySpace under Bourne’s then band ‘Son of Dork’, then came the re-recording for McBusted and finally, as it was always meant to be heard we now have the Busted version.

In May that year, Cobus Potgieter, who had previously stood in as drummer on Busted's 2016 tour, announced that he would be the studio drummer for the upcoming fourth album. All image and audio content is used by permission of the copyright holders or their agents, and/or according to fair dealing as per the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Read more about the condition New: An item that is still in its original shrink wrap from the manufacturer and the original manufacturer’s seal (if applicable) has not been removed. million copies in the UK alone and their 2003 follow-up A Present for Everyone came very close to matching it.