Gun – Hombres (2024) Review

By the time Gun released Favourite Pleasures in 2017, their comeback years had finally produced an album capable of standing alongside the records that made their name.

Then the world stopped.

Seven years, one pandemic and an interesting acoustic Greatest Hits collection later, eighth studio LP Hombres arrives with an altogether more difficult job. This isn’t about proving that Gun can function without Mark Rankin anymore; Dante Gizzi settled that argument years ago.

The question now is whether this version of the band can maintain the standard it has set for itself.

The answer comes wrapped in huge guitars, pummelling drums and some of the biggest choruses they’ve written since their ’90s peak.

Hombres takes everything that worked on Favourite Pleasures, adds another layer of muscle, then crams the standard edition into a remarkably lean 36 minutes. There’s very little fat here, and even when the band wander beyond their usual territory, they rarely lose sight of what made Gun so formidable in the first place.

They’re All Fired Up

The opening track couldn’t be titled more appropriately.

All Fired Up tears straight out of the gates with the kind of urgency you’d expect from a band that had spent several years wondering when — or even if — normal service would resume.

Dante Gizzi later described this song as an outlet for the pent-up frustration of lockdown, and you can hear this energy throughout the track. Paul McManus drives everything forward from behind the kit, Giuliano Gizzi piles a serrated guitar riff over the top, and the chorus arrives with all the subtlety of somebody kicking open the pub doors after two years trapped indoors.

It also establishes the production immediately.

Simon Bloor was already familiar with the band, but Hombres sounds considerably more physical than some of their previous work, with the final mix handled by Daryl Thorpe. More importantly, the band themselves went into the record determined to make the guitars and drums enormous again — exactly the kind of mission statement Gun fans have been requesting for years.

That approach suits them down to the ground, because there’s enough polish and modern framework here to stop Hombres sounding deliberately retro, but nobody has sanded away the rough edges.

"I'm trying to fill the void I feel inside."

ALL FIRED UP

Levels Above

The album really starts flexing its muscles with Take Me Back Home.

For a few seconds, its opening riff and melody threaten to wander suspiciously close to Steal Your Fire, but just as you’re preparing to accuse Jools of raiding his own cupboards, the song folds outwards into one of the broadest choruses Gun have ever written.

It’s glorious stuff.

Dante has since explained that the lyric was partly inspired by his childhood obsession with Sega’s OutRun, particularly the addictive feeling of pushing towards the next level while never quite reaching it. That obscure starting point somehow makes perfect sense once you hear the song: Take Me Back Home feels designed for motion, with a high-octane chorus that practically begs to be played in a car with the windows down.

Elsewhere, the slow-burning You Are What I Need is every bit as effective, as new addition Ru Moy slaps an endlessly replayable guitar riff against layers of soul-inflected backing vocals that provide the chorus with a satisfyingly wide frame.

Gun have flirted with this kind of texture before, but here they finally get it right.

Then comes Never Enough, which dispenses with most of the decoration and simply lets the rhythm section beat seven shades out of the speakers. Giuliano Gizzi’s power chords collide with McManus’ drums like waves crashing into a battered cliffside, while Dante’s vocals wrap around the melody with just enough rasp to remind you how far he’s developed since first stepping up to the microphone in 2012.

This isn’t clever for the sake of being clever.

It’s simply a great rock band playing to its strengths.

Yet Hombres avoids becoming ten variations of the same idea.

Fake Life introduces a dirtier, glam-flavoured strut, taking aim at the absurdity of influencer culture and the carefully manufactured lives people construct online. The T. Rex influence is difficult to miss, but Gun drag it through enough grit to make it their own.

Lucky Guy loosens things even further with a rolling groove that recalls the addictiveness of 1997 hit Crazy You, while Don’t Hide Your Fears Tonight sits closer to the melodic rock formula that Gun have always handled so well.

The final result is an album that feels cohesive without becoming predictable.

Falling

The biggest surprise arrives halfway through.

Falling begins quietly, with Dante sitting above train station sound effects and a circular guitar pattern that gradually gathers weight around him. The arrangement keeps building at a steady pace, and then expands into something much larger than its opening suggests.

It’s one of the finest vocal performances of his career to date.

There’s no need for the acrobatics that characterised his earlier years behind the microphone — the delivery here is controlled, weary and completely comfortable, which suits a lyric written about the breakdown of a relationship.

Lead guitarist and elder brother Giuliano has linked the composition to the melancholic atmosphere of Don Henley’s iconic The Boys Of Summer, and the band themselves have since singled out the track as one of their favourites.

Unfortunately, Falling also contains one of Hombres’ few genuinely irritating decisions.

Just as Jools appears ready to unleash a second guitar solo and carry the song towards the huge crescendo it has spent three-and-a-half minutes earning, it fades out. This is a technique he deployed so effectively on mid-90s classics such as Don’t Say It’s Over and One Reason, and it’s a shame the band didn’t go all-in with it here, too.

If somebody could find the master tapes and give him another forty seconds, that would be grand.

Brothers In Arms

If its predecessor restored their appetite for riffs, then Hombres gives Giuliano Gizzi permission to run riot.

For years, one of the strangest frustrations surrounding modern Gun was how often a guitarist this good seemed determined to stay out of his own way. Break The Silence brought back the rock sound but still felt light on face-melting solos, while 2015’s Frantic pushed him even deeper into the mix.

There are no such complaints here:

Jools is everywhere.

Crucially, his guitar work never feels like unnecessary decoration: the solos are concise, the riffs are tightly constructed, and his lead breaks usually arrive at the exact moment a song needs another gear to kick into.

The enthusiasm within Gizzi’s playing makes Hombres feel truly alive — you’ll hear it in the way he eagerly climbs the fretboard in the milliseconds before each solo, like a child preparing to open a face-melting gift on Christmas morning.

New rhythm guitarist Ruaraidh “Ru” Macfarlane helps enormously in this respect. His arrival gives Jools more freedom to move between rhythm and lead without hollowing out the songs underneath him, while Andy Carr and Paul McManus form the kind of heavy, uncomplicated foundation that Gun’s brand of blue-collar rock has always required.

That extra weight also benefits Dante.

By 2024, any lingering comparisons with ex-frontman Mark Rankin feel increasingly irrelevant. Gizzi isn’t trying to reproduce the dark baritone of their first era, and the songs no longer sound constructed to accommodate somebody filling another man’s role.

His rasp, range and natural enthusiasm have become fundamental parts of Gun’s current sound.

Interestingly, Hombres marks their fourth album of entirely new material with Dante behind the microphone — matching the four released with Rankin — and it sounds like the work of a band that’s spent enough time together to figure out exactly where everybody fits.

A Couple Of Misfires

For an album that gets so much right, Hombres does stumble in a couple of places.

Boys Don’t Cry is the clearest example.

It’s interesting from a lyrical perspective; Dante claims the track is about people consumed by their own superiority — the type who expect life to continually reward them without recognising the need for humility or effort.

However, the song’s baggier, almost Britpop-style rhythm section feels strangely detached from the band’s usual brand of grounded, groove-driven hard rock. Imagine if The Stone Roses hired Axl Rose for a day and you’re on the right track.

Sadly, not even a headline-grabbing solo from Jools can save it.

Closing track A Shift In Time is similarly underwhelming.

Its acoustic-led arrangement is perfectly pleasant, and there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the performance, but after an album packed with enormous riffs and some of the strongest choruses of Gun’s second life, it feels like an oddly subdued way to finish. Rather than providing a satisfying comedown, the track simply takes some of the air out of the record at the point where it should be leaving one final impression.

Three More Rounds

The Deluxe Edition adds a trio of new songs that feel like genuine extensions of the album rather than leftovers.

Coming Back To You brings another slab of straight-ahead rock, while Pride is armed with the kind of simple, immediate chorus that makes its omission from the standard edition difficult to understand. Wrong To Be Right holds its own alongside them, giving Hombres three extra tracks without noticeably lowering the standard.

The expanded version of the album later picked up some unexpected Hollywood exposure when Pride and Lucky Guy appeared in Amazon Prime’s crime thriller Damaged, starring Samuel L. Jackson, giving Gun another route to listeners beyond their usual audience.

More importantly, the extra material makes an already strong album even stronger.

"Treated like a king but I'm feeling like a fool up in my plastic world."

TAKE ME BACK HOME

Gun: Hombres

The most impressive thing about Hombres isn’t that Gun have made a strong record this late in their career.

It’s that there’s nothing particularly nostalgic about it.

The band are not leaning on Word Up, recycling old riffs or asking listeners to be impressed by their longevity. This is a modern rock album with enough confidence to stand alongside their best work, from a line-up that no longer feels like the second version of anything.

The commercial response appears to have finally caught up with the quality, too. Hombres reached No.10 on the UK Albums Chart, becoming their biggest hit since Swagger thirty years earlier, and climbed to No.1 in Scotland and No.2 on the UK Rock & Metal Albums Chart. Later that year, it received Album of the Year at the Scottish Music Awards in Glasgow, where the band closed the ceremony at the famous Barrowland Ballroom.

For a band that once appeared to have permanently derailed itself, the distance travelled since their reformation is quite remarkable.

Hombres serves as audible proof that Gun are no longer trying to reclaim their best years.

They’re adding to them.