Razorlight is just about the biggest band in England, but they can’t get arrested on this side of the ocean. In some ways, that’s completely understandable. Singer/songsmith Johnny Borrell brandishes that certain clever British taste for circumspect grandiosity that doesn’t always easily make fans in North America. He’s like some kind of latter-day Bryan Ferry, who wants to be the center of the show but is conscious that he simply shouldn’t be that kind of spectacle. While it’s his job to be at the center of this rock circus, it’s as if he is making the best of being in wrong place. Borrell took this fish-out-of-water character and made his role work on the band’s first two records. On Razorlight’s debut Up All Night, he was the buzzed but mirthful narrator left glaring into a set of rock-and-roll eyes. On the band’s America-obsessed, self-titled second record, he was lost in a land he didn’t understand but was completely high on, while the band drafted a perfect backdrop of pop, soul, and rock to back his musings.

In his song “Believe,” Q-Tip makes a statement that encapsulates the concept, tone, and execution of his first album in nine years—“Naysayers can hate. We concentrate to bring believe back.”