After their first official single “Vitriol” found a home on local airwaves in 2007, Bluejuice spent the next seven years as youth-radio darlings. Off the back of anthemic subsequent single “Broken Leg”, they’d also court guaranteed waves of young hands on the festival circuit. It was the kind of success that founding member and vocalist Jake Stone seemed to feel had a distinct time limit: By 2014, Bluejuice had disbanded citing fears of aging beyond their assumed demographic. Retrospectable collects 12 of Bluejuice’s hits and personal favourites—plus the heartening inclusions of lead single “I’ll Go Crazy”, hilarious standout “George Costanza” and “S.O.S.”—the last original tracks the Sydney quartet would release for almost a decade. Essentially a fond farewell to long-time fans, Retrospectable also functions as a love letter to the potential of musical osmosis. As the years progressed, Bluejuice became less and less classifiable just as they became, somewhat bizarrely, ever more accessible. Dominated by songs from their three studio records—2007’s Problems, 2009’s Head of the Hawk and 2011’s Company—it’s the latter album that is most telling of the band’s talent for incorporating genre inflections with enough panache that the result is often described simply by virtue of the band’s name. That Bluejuice called it quits while parlaying the unclassifiable pop of “Act Yr Age” (famously sampled by Bliss N Eso) and “Cheap Trix”’s marvellous inhalation of queer club standards was both ironic and premature—a realisation they possibly had when they elected to reform in 2022.
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