After splitting in 2005, Busted are back! This is pretty exciting news for anybody who is British and has a functioning short-term memory, because while they were active they put out some of the finest alt-school disco anthems you could possibly hope for. "Year 3000"? "What I Go To School For"? "Air Hostess"? I mean, forget about it.After releasing a dramatic 6-minute video involving lots of hugging, the lads are back together, but times have changed. It's not the 00s anymore – you can't top the charts by being Blink-182-lite and hope to get away with it. So, as you can see below, they seem to be reinventing themselves as a sort of serious, velour suit jacket-wearing, earnest Abbey Road live pop group. Now finding themselves sounding somewhere between the Busted of old, an quiet night in round Tom Odell's house, Adele's phone calls, and the kind of act you would see on the BBC Sound of lists if they were not all clearly expectant fathers.Here they are, perfoming an updated rendition of "Meet You There" from their 2003 seminal album A Present For Everyone. The single acoustic guitar and three-part pop punk harmonies of the original are still there, but now there is a piano and a general John Lewis Christmas Advert vibe that transcends the decade of its inception.Perhaps Busted are using their old songs to slowly transition into a new identity, maybe they're still feeling out their place in the UK's beige-pop landscape of today, or maybe they're revisiting previous material because they are Busted and they feel like it. In a fantastic piece for Fuse on the return of "mall punk", Maria Sherman highlights how bands who were once considered "adolescent obsessions" (think Good Charlotte, The Used, and All Time Low) are now reaching a place of critical acclaim. "In 2015, people started to learn that whatever shame they felt in revisiting their beloved high school sounds doesn't really exist," Sherman writes, "this is just fun music you loved then, and it's fun music you can love again, now."This Busted video might not be quite be the dizzying heights of critical acclaim, but if 5 Seconds of Summer can produce gold and silver-selling records and The Starting Line can reform after 8 years and still make good shit, there's no reason to believe Busted can't do the same.Watch below.
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