And with Royal Blood, they've hit the jackpot: the Brighton bass-and-drums duo have swiftly become the most universally deified emergent UK rock band since the Arctic Monkeys first thawed out a decade ago. Still, this circumstance has never stopped the British music press from making a weekly sport of anointing new saviors for the country to rally around. When purists lament its supposed death, what they’re really lamenting is not so much the disappearance of guitar-strapping bands as a dearth of ones we can all believe in. Rock may no longer be the center of popular culture, but it still occupies vast amounts of space around it. When you consider the combined festival-filling fanbases for metal, indie, and new country (and whatever derisive invented subgenre you’d apply to bands like Magic!), there’s still a healthy demand for songs played on plugged-in guitars and backed by bass, drums, and (budget permitting) pyro. But the audience for rock music never disappeared, it merely pluralized. Classic-rock radio may still play Black Sabbath alongside the Eagles and the Police, but the modern-day descendants of those bands are now funneled through discrete radio formats that serve different demographics.
But then, the gatekeepers of tradition need us to believe rock is dying in order to keep selling us a new resurrection narrative, like any consumer product in the mature phase of its life cycle and in need of a good marketing hook. In the year 2014, the only thing more tired and predictable than mainstream rock is the perpetual reports of its demise.