The Hives, Brixton Academy

Best known from the early 2000s garage rock revival, The Hives will be performing at Brixton Academy in August.

Sweden's The Hives were big news in the 2000s, thanks to their relentlessly energetic, ADHD-infused garage rock. They hail from Sweden, but the cockily-titled compilation album Your New Favourite Band shot them to global success in 2001.

Since then they've produced a trio of records: 2004's Tyrannosaurus Hives, 2007's The Black and White Album, and 2012's Lex Hives. Officially formed in 1993, they have spent over 20 years refining their sound, which is that of a band refusing to accept that music may have moved on from playing everything as fast as you can.

In their case, however, this is not a bad thing, especially at this stage in their career: they now have an arsenal of chaotic, powerful songs to choose from. There's the pleasurable coercion of their most recent album opener 'Come On', a rallying cry from rock evangelist-in-chief Pelle Almqvist (he is prone to claiming he is on a mission to purge the world of bad rock), or the guitars that climb on top of one another to be heard on dynamite sounding (quite literally) 'Tick Tick Boom'. 

Older classics like Hate To Say I Told You So ' have that same finger jabbing intensity of Almqvist's full-throated vocals though the instrumentation was perhaps more measured and the furious energy more skillfully channelled. New song ' Two Kinds Of Trouble ' was recently debuted at a Tel Aviv festival and is more of the same: tight verses, and big sing-a-long chorus. Make no mistake, though: The Hives are coming to Brixton to convert you.