ALBUM REVIEW - DICE – "I Thought The Altitude Would Make It Worth The View"
- Rick E
- Aug 5
- 9 min read
WORDS RICK E
DICE
"I Thought The Altitude Would Make It Worth The View"
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Right then, let’s clear something up before we go a single step further. A title like “I Thought The Altitude Would Make It Worth The View” had me bracing for a sprawling forty-minute post-rock odyssey, all glacial crescendos, weeping reverb, and song names longer than the songs themselves. It reads like the sort of thing you would find scrawled on a gatefold sleeve somewhere between a Mono record and an Explosions In The Sky bootleg. What Perth’s DICE have served up on their second album is nothing of the sort and thank goodness for that.
This is euphoric, sun-baked indie-rock with the roof down and the tank full, and even a committed doom-and-black-metal lifer like yours truly, more at home in a fog-machine haze of tremolo picking than a festival field full of raised phones, found himself grinning like an idiot by track three. Sometimes it does you good to step outside the crypt and squint at the sunshine for forty minutes, and this here is a record that makes the exercise thoroughly worthwhile.
Let’s set the scene properly. DICE are a four-piece out of Boorloo, otherwise known as Perth, Western Australia, formed back in 2020 and cutting their teeth on the sweaty pub circuit before triple j airplay and a Hottest 100 placing started turning heads.
They’ve spent the last few years quietly transforming from scrappy garage-rock upstarts, the kind of band who’d knock out a fan-favourite like “Double Espresso” and level a festival tent flat, into a genuine global touring concern with a sound somewhere in the orbit of The Killers, Bloc Party and Two Door Cinema Club. Their 2024 debut Midnight Zoo did the business on the ARIA charts and traded the carefree veneer of the early singles for something more introspective, last year’s WINGS EP stretched the canvas a bit wider still, and somewhere in between they’ve held a spot-on triple j’s most-played list for three years running, taking the show to sold-out rooms across London, New York, Toronto, Amsterdam and Sydney.
For album number two they’ve done the thing every band dream of and half of them fluff completely: they’ve gone to Hollywood. Specifically, to EastWest Studios, one of the rooms where the Beach Boys pieced together Pet Sounds, and they’ve handed the desk to Joe Chiccarelli, an eleven-time Grammy winner whose CV takes in The Strokes, The White Stripes, and The Shins. For good measure they’ve drafted in Jay Watson of Tame Impala and POND fame to drape the whole thing in synths, with a guest turn from the ever-inventive G Flip somewhere in the mix as well. On paper it is a serious step up in ambition, and the pressure to justify all that firepower is real.
Now, that kind of upgrade can go one of two ways. Either a band keeps its teeth and simply records them better, or the gloss swallows the songs whole and you are left with something that sounds expensive and says nothing. The good news is that DICE land firmly in the former camp. Yes, this is a shinier, poppier, more expansive record than anything they have made before, all glistening keys and widescreen choruses, but the restless, live-wire energy that made them worth watching in the first place hasn’t been sanded off. Ben Hodge has found a clearer, more assured voice to sit inside these bigger arrangements, Tom King’s guitar still bites when it needs to, and the rhythm section of Regan Beazley and Sam Barrett-Lennard keeps everything taut and forward-leaning. The production is warm, immediate, and roomy, the sort of mix that sounds like a proper band breathing the same air rather than a laptop full of plug-ins. It is polished, but it breathes.
“Breathe” opens the record and does exactly what a good opener should, which is grab you by the collar and announce the terms of engagement. There is a chest-out, full-pelt urgency here that recalls Gang of Youths at their most anthemic, all surging momentum and a chorus built for arms-aloft festival singalongs. Hodge sounds liberated from the off, and the band lock in behind him with real conviction. It is the sound of a group who spent 2025 playing to sold-out rooms in London and New York and came home knowing exactly how big they’re allowed to sound now. Barrett-Lennard’s drums drive the whole thing forward with a martial insistence, Beazley’s bass locks in tight beneath, and the synths add a widescreen glow that the band would never have reached for a couple of years ago. As statements of intent go, it is a belter, and it sets a bar the rest of the album spends its time clearing with room to spare.
“Loose Change” is where Tom King really gets to stretch out, his wiry, live-wire lines carving out the melodic centre of the track while the synths shimmer away underneath. This is DICE showing off their new sense of scale without ever losing the immediacy that’s always been their calling card, and it’s easy to hear why they leaned on it as one of the record’s signposts. There is a lovely tension between the propulsive rhythm and the more reflective lyric, which push and pull between wanting to run and wanting to stay put, and the band ride it beautifully. The chorus is enormous without being cynical about it, and by the time the last one lands you are already reaching to hear it again.
“Cooler” was the lead single, and you can understand why it got the nod. Premiered on triple j and armed with a hook that lodges itself somewhere behind your eyes and refuses to leave, it’s a masterclass in the kind of instantly gratifying indie-pop these four do so well. The keyboard work throughout is a real highlight, Watson’s fingerprints all over the arrangement, adding colour and depth without ever tipping into gimmickry. It has got that top-down, foot-on-the-dash quality that the whole album trades in, a song about feeling untouchable that genuinely makes you feel a bit untouchable while it’s on. There is a confidence to the way it struts through its three-and-a-bit minutes that tells you the band knew exactly what they had, and Hodge’s brighter register suits it down to the ground. Pure serotonin, and unapologetic about it.
“Footprints” pulls the focus in and shows a softer, more vulnerable side of the band. There’s a clean, sun-dappled shimmer to the guitars here, all chiming lines and airy space, which brings early Phoenix to mind, and Hodge sounds newly comfortable with letting his guard down. When he sings about never having thought they would end up like this, there is a genuine tug to it, a sense of a young man clocking how quickly everything has changed and not being entirely sure how he feels about it. It’s the first real breather on the record, and it’s overseen with a lightness of touch that suggests these lads have grown up quite a bit since the garage days. Restraint is a hard trick to pull off when you’ve just been handed a world-class studio, and they resist the urge to overcook it.
“Call Me For A Good Time” swaggers back in with the album’s most unabashedly fun moment, a shot of pure devil-may-care energy that lives up entirely to its title. This is DICE embracing their “life’s too short” philosophy without a shred of embarrassment, and it’s all the better for it. The verses bounce along on a springy groove before opening out into a chorus that is practically begging to be bellowed back at them across a festival field. There is a garage-rock scruffiness lurking just beneath the polish here, a reminder that for all the Hollywood sheen these are still the same kids who cut their teeth playing sweaty pub gigs back in Scarborough. It is silly in the best possible way, and it provides a welcome jolt right when the album needs one.
“Echo” arrives as the record’s newest single, complete with its own video, and a canny choice. This is DICE operating in their most expansive mode, the synths swelling and receding like tide, Hodge’s vocal soaring over the top of an arrangement that keeps finding new corners to explore. There is a yearning quality to it, that recurring theme of chasing something bigger than yourself only to find that the perspective comes with its own weight, and the band dress it in genuinely gorgeous sounds. The production really earns its keep here, every element given room to ring out, and the whole thing builds to a properly cathartic payoff. It is the sort of song that would have sounded thin on the debut and sounds enormous now.
“Rooftops” keeps the widescreen ambition rolling, and there is a lovely sense of altitude to it, fittingly enough, a track that feels like it was written to be played at the top of something looking out at everything. The interplay between Barrett-Lennard’s drums and Beazley’s bass gives it a real pulse, a solid anchor around which the guitars and keys can swirl and climb. Lyrically it sits squarely in the album’s wheelhouse, all fleeting moments, and the ache of knowing they will not last, and the band deliver it with enough conviction to keep it the right side of sentimental. It’s not the most immediate thing here, but it rewards a bit of patience, growing steadily more persuasive with every spin as the chorus works its way under your skin. It slots neatly into the record’s back half without ever once feeling like filler.
“Stars” is the ballad, the moment the whole thing slows right down and lets the emotion breathe. This is Hodge at his most exposed, his more open, unguarded singing paying real dividends over a bed of gentle guitars and subtle synth washes. There is a hymn-like quality to the arrangement, a stillness that the band have learned to trust, and it’s genuinely affecting without ever slipping into mawkishness. Coming this deep into the record, after all the euphoria and the galloping choruses, it lands as a proper emotional gut-punch, a reminder that underneath the good-time anthems there’s a band with something real to say about connection and loss. It is the sort of song that would end up soundtracking somebody’s most important memory, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
“Daydream” drifts in on a wave of shimmering texture, the most overtly atmospheric cut on the album and the one where Jay Watson’s influence is felt most keenly. There is a hazy, sun-through-net-curtains quality to it, the guitars phasing gently while the rhythm section keeps a hypnotic pulse ticking away underneath. It is a track content to wash over you rather than grab you by the lapels, and after the emotional heft of “Stars” that feels like exactly the right call. Some listeners might find it the point where the album’s more expansive tendencies edge towards pleasant background wallpaper, and I’ll admit it doesn’t quite grab me the way the front half does, but as a bit of late-record breathing space it does its job with real grace.
“Bullet Train” brings the whole thing home, and at a lean two minutes and forty-five seconds it’s the shortest thing here by some distance, which feels entirely deliberate. After all that widescreen ambition, DICE close on a burst of concentrated, propulsive energy, a final top-down sprint that ties the record’s themes of liberation and forward motion into one last euphoric rush. There is no grand fade-out, no bloated seven-minute epilogue, just a band pinning their ears back and going for it one more time, all urgency, adrenaline, before pulling up sharp and leaving the platform empty. It’s a smart, punchy way to end an album that’s fundamentally about the thrill of the climb, and it leaves you wanting to flip the thing straight back to the top and set off again.
So where does that leave us? “I Thought The Altitude Would Make It Worth The View” is a genuine coming-of-age record, the sound of a band who have been handed the keys to a proper studio and a world-class producer and have used them to expand rather than to hide. The leap from garage-rock scrappiness to this glossy, synth-laced, arena-ready sound could easily have felt forced, a case of a young band reaching too far too fast, but DICE make it feel utterly organic. The tunes are strong, the performances are excellent, and Chiccarelli’s production captures the vitality that made them so compelling in the first place while giving it a whole new sense of scale. What is most impressive is how sure-footed the band are with the bigger emotional picture, forever caught between the giddy rush of chasing something and the quiet vertigo of finally getting there. There’s a real honesty running through it, a refusal to tie every song off with a neat bow, and that willingness to sit in the messy in-between is exactly what keeps the record lingering long after the last note fades.
If I’ve a criticism, and every review needs one, it’s that a couple of tracks in the back half start to blur into one another, the album’s brighter, breezier palette occasionally leaning on a similar mid-tempo euphoria until the edges soften a touch. It’s the same charge levelled at plenty of records that live in this world, and it’s a minor gripe against a set that gets far more right than wrong. Is it going to convert the corpse-painted purists who never willingly stray from the second wave? Probably not, and it isn’t trying to. But for anyone who appreciates a genuinely well-crafted, big-hearted indie-rock album with actual tunes, real emotional heft, and production you could happily get lost in, this is a triumph, and proof that DICE have climbed to a peak that is theirs alone. The view, as it happens, turns out to have been very much worth the climb after all.
Stand-out Tracks: “Breathe,” “Cooler,” “Echo,” “Stars,” “Loose Change”
4/5
I Thought The Altitude Would Make It Worth The View – FULL TRACK LIST
1. Breathe
2. Loose Change
3. Cooler
4. Footprints
5. Call Me For A Good Time
6. Echo
7. Rooftops
8. Stars
9. Daydream
10. Bullet Train
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