“There’s a difference between having fun and being happy,” says Justin Young. And in the space between fun and happiness lies the sixth Vaccines album, Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations. It’s a record that drips with fun—ten songs in just over half an hour, packed with hooks, melodies, and pop smarts—but it also explores how real life lets us down, no matter what we tell the world on our Instagram stories.
“It’s about loss,” Young says. “And coming to terms with that loss—not necessarily grieving for it, but trying to get a new understanding of it. I don’t just mean in a romantic sense.”
The album’s title comes from a misremembered lyric in Don McLean’s American Pie (“I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck / With a pink carnation in a pick-up truck”), which sparked a train of thought. “I was living in LA while writing this record, and American Pie is a song about disillusionment with America and the American dream, and his feeling that something had died. I guess I was coming to terms with similar things—my understanding of what the real West Coast of America was, after growing up on a diet of American pop culture. That was all coming to a head as various relationships were ending, and Freddie [Cowan, guitar] was leaving the band. That was the seed of it. It’s about the loss of dreams.”
The tension is evident in the album’s opener, Sometimes, I Swear. Over insistent drums and euphoric guitars, Young sets out what might be the record’s manifesto: “I’m caught in the good fight / I start to feel small / When the gravity hits me / I’ve got nowhere to fall.” The chorus makes the sense of displacement even plainer: “Sometimes, I swear, it feels like I don’t belong anywhere.”
“Increasingly, I think we all feel that gap between reality and expectation,” Young says. “I feel lonely, but I also feel like a loner. I feel lonely when I don’t have a relationship, but then I want to distance myself when I do.”
That sense of displacement is everywhere. He speaks of playing a triumphant show at the Victorious festival in Portsmouth this past summer, “and then I went back to my childhood bed—which is not something I do very often—and it was a reminder that it was as close to a home as I’ve ever really come.”
These are complicated feelings—ambivalence, doubt, fear, maybe some shame. So why are they wrapped up in pop songs that fizz like a sherbet fountain? “Maybe because the more universal they feel, the less alone I feel. Even now, when I sing ‘All alone, all alone, I am on my own’ in the breakdown of If You Wanna, I well up, and I feel less alone. I grew up on an ever-changing, quite eclectic diet of music that made me feel less alone. The songs I connected with were always the ones that made me feel less alone and made me see the humanity in the people whose pictures were on my wall. So I want people to be able to connect with my songs as easily as possible.”
The first song to be debuted live was Heartbreak Kid—an instant Vaccines classic that barrels along sunnily like a convertible sports car—which the band unveiled at their secret show at London’s Sebright Arms earlier this year. It was written during a burst of creativity, as the whole album was written between November 2021 and May 2022.
