PRETENDERS

The album tracks are just as striking as the chart hits

Pretenders ( Deluxe Edition)/

PretendersII (Deluxe Edition)

RHINO

10/10, 9/10

IN her 2015 memoir, , Chrissie Hynde described the pre-show ritual in the early days of her band, the Pretenders: the four of them, backstage, waiting, “like dogs at the gate”. As they took to the stage they would play Wagner’s “Ride Of The Valkyries”, then widely known for scoring a pivotal sequence in : the, working at Malcom McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s clothing shop SEX, dabbling in punk, eventually forming her own band, with her own songs, she distilled the essence of her approach to life and creativity: “I thought if I kept not doing what I didn’t want to do, I would naturally get closer to what I did want.” Much of the force and allure of Pretenders songs lies precisely in that space, in Hynde’s remarkable ability to articulate and conjure that sensation: the feeling of getting closer to what you want.There would be wilder success to come after these first two albums, a career that would span four decades, platinum sales, Grammys, the Rock’n’Roll Hall Of Fame. But at this point in the life of the Pretenders, we can hear a band for whom that sensation was arguably at its loudest, its most insistent: the sound of dogs at the gate, chasing something, getting closer.