Rudimental: Toast to Our Differences review – a big grab bag of party tunes

Rudimental are the perfect band for people who like music and enjoy dancing but don’t really care about either. They’ve collected another grab bag of party tunes that sound as good on your phone as in an arena, fronted by a dizzying number of featured vocalists. Largely they steer away from the polite, very British drum’n’bass that made them famous, toward Jamaica and America, landing comfortably in the profitable hinterland between Calvin Harris’s cold calculation and Major Lazer’s wild abandon.

Still, one British thing they keep is a stiff upper lip, as on These Days. Its post-breakup lament is hung on a string of unforgettable hooks, as good as grown-up pop gets. Although you could criticise Rudimental for misjudging the public mood here and in America, where our differences are viscerally attacked rather than celebrated, there’s nothing wrong with this album’s unifying ambitions and things-get-better mood. There’s just something studied about it that’s hard to love. Nothing matches the twitchy paranoia of their 2015 Ed Sheeran masterpiece Bloodstream; they’ve defaulted to playlist promiscuity rather than artistry and personality. At eight tracks it could be album of the year. There are 16.