Your New Favourite Band is a well-timed and well-chosen introduction to the band. It collects four tracks each from the two Hives full-lengths, plus four more from their EP work. They're neither as disciplined as the Strokes nor as faithful to music tradition as the White Stripes, though these facts do much to lift them above both bands. Hives songs are short, uneven blasts of pure aggro, barely controlled but occasionally played with a few subtleties intact. Nothing they play sounds particularly new, their inheritors extending from the Stooges to Buzzcocks to Minor Threat and even Ash. Still, the Hives break right through all the marketing hype because they never sound contrived or poised. Lead singer Howlin' Pelle Almqvist must surely be foaming at the mouth as he delivers the largely incoherent middle section on "Untutored Youth," and the group sounds refreshingly innocent bashing out "Supply and Demand," "Mad Man," and "Hate to Say I Told You So."