Released in time for the Christmas market, Standards serves as a summation of The Alarm’s 1980s output — a decade of big-hearted, big-sounding rock anthems that aimed for the rafters and often reached them. Rather than a new studio record, it’s a compilation of the band’s defining moments, drawing together hits like “Sixty Eight Guns,” “The Stand,” and “Spirit of ’76,” alongside a few fresh touches: the newly recorded “The Road,” a reworked “Unsafe Building,” and a rubbish cover of “Happy Christmas (War Is Over).”
It was a stop gap between last year's Change (their fourth studio album) and next year's swansong Raw. As a collection, Standards captures what made The Alarm distinctive — their mix of punk earnestness, folk-rock idealism, and stadium-scale ambition. Tracks like “Sixty Eight Guns” still carry a raw, uplifting energy, and “Spirit of ’76” remains a stirring anthem of youth and resilience. For newcomers, Standards is an accessible entry point: it distills the band’s most recognisable songs and presents them in a single, cohesive-enough package.
Yet hearing these songs side by side also exposes some of The Alarm’s limitations. Their grand, impassioned delivery sometimes teeters into over-earnestness, and without the momentum of a live performance, the production can feel a bit heavy-handed. The compilation lacks the narrative flow of a proper album, moving instead through snapshots of different sessions and producers across the decade.
Still, Standards succeeds in its main goal — to remind listeners of a band that, for a time, stood shoulder to shoulder with the likes of U2 and Simple Minds in their drive to fuse passion, politics, and melody. It’s not their most subtle or unified record, but it’s a strong, heartfelt portrait of The Alarm at their most anthemic. For anyone curious about the band’s legacy, this is where to start.
