Review

By Amanda Holborn | 29/06/2026

London four-piece Daydreamers arrive at the long form with all the confidence of a band who have already done the “building a community online” phase and are now determined to turn it into something louder, sweatier and harder to ignore. Their debut album Have You Tried Screaming?, released via Robots + Humans / Epic Records, is pitched as a document of heartbreak, uncertainty and fragile optimism. In practice, it often sounds like those emotions being run through a very polished filter. Across eleven tracks, the band lean heavily into what frontman Riley calls “sad euphoria” – a neat phrase that fits the record a little too well. These are songs designed to crest into big, communal choruses, built on shimmering guitars and cinematic production that clearly owes a debt to The Strokes, MGMT and more recent indie-pop maximalists like Djo. The influence is obvious enough that at times the album risks feeling like a carefully assembled collage of familiar touchpoints, rather than a fully singular statement. That said, when Daydreamers commit, they really do hit a convincing stride. The title track, with its blunt emotional premise and rallying-cry delivery, sets the tone effectively: vulnerability not as confession, but as group chant. Start Living is the clearest example of their ambition working in their favour, pairing sunlit instrumentation with a slightly exhausted lyrical core that captures modern self-help fatigue without collapsing into cynicism. Much of the record is rooted in post-breakup recalibration, with Riley writing in isolation before the band coalesced around him – Aurora, Jay and Marco now functioning less like backing musicians and more like co-authors of this widescreen emotional vocabulary. There’s a sense throughout that these songs were stress-tested in bedrooms and SoundCloud drafts long before they reached studio gloss. Where the album occasionally falters is in its consistency of emotional texture. The desire for arena-scale catharsis can flatten some of the more intimate moments, and a few tracks blur together in their pursuit of uplift. Yet it would be unfair to dismiss the record as hollow: there is a genuine thread of communal intent running through it, sharpened by the band’s reputation as a live draw at festivals like Reading & Leeds and Latitude. Ultimately, Have You Tried Screaming? is less a reinvention of indie-pop than a confident consolidation of where the genre currently sits in 2026: emotionally open, algorithm-aware, and forever chasing the moment when personal catharsis becomes collective release. Daydreamers may not have fully escaped their influences yet, but they’ve learned how to make them sing in unison.