Silence Yourself must've been a hard act to follow. It's not just that Savages' 2013 was a great album, though it absolutely was. It's that Silence Yourself was a closed system -- the sort of great album that suggests no great follow-up is possible. Savages arrived fully-formed, with a sound and an aesthetic and a point-of-view. It was tempting to call them a punk band; they had velocity and ferocity and vengeful intensity. But they weren't wild. They were spartan and meticulous, their music as efficient and carefully assembled as a German car. That album had no wasted motion, no extraneous sounds or gestures. It was new wave turned feral -- Elastica during wartime. And go ahead and ask Elastica how easy it is to come up with a sophomore album when your debut is an out-the-gate classic. In most cases, your only real option is to make an album that sounds like the first one but isn't as good. But Savages figured out a way out of that trap. On Adore Life, they go big.