He basically admits that this is a front on Another Hit Of Showmanship, which does shatter the illusion, but feels very deliberate about it. Spiller isn’t the hard-livin’ rockstar he might want to believe he is or portray himself as, and though he tries to put up that facade on a track like Cool, there’s a notable insecurity on Do You Love Me and I Hate How Much I Want You that’s rooted in glam-rock ideals but not as explicitly as some might extol. That’s because it naturally all centres on Luke Spiller as a frontman, the usual process of operations for bands like this, but without the human undertones that The Struts bring which show how much of a costume this actually is. But because The Struts are canny enough to know where the line between flagrantly plastic peacocking and bold-faced imitation lies, Strange Days becomes yet another example of this sort of thing being far better than it has any right to be. After all, the headline-grabber on Strange Days has been just how much superstar clout they can wring out of themselves on a surface level, such is the case with guest stars as varied as Tom Morello, Phil Collen and Joe Elliot of Def Leppard and even Robbie Williams. The result was nothing close to deep, but it was a lot more fun that other throwback acts care to entertain, and when considering the subsequent routes The Struts have taken to get a Queen-calibre legacy, the showboating, performative nature of it all feels about right. They almost had that window of superstardom a few years ago, something that should have been solidified by 2018’s Young & Dangerous, which was surprisingly good in its flipping of retro-rock banality into something flashier and bursting with glam-rock pomposity. In what’s almost the complete countering direction to the way these things should work, it frequently feels like people should be paying more attention to The Struts.