Making a bad album is one thing, but making a boring album is even worse. Mat Kearney’s last album, City of Black and White, was by no means bad, but it was more than a little boring. On it, Kearney ditched his hip-hop influences and ended up sounding like every other soft-rock musician aiming to get a song featured on Grey’s Anatomy.

Thank goodness, then, that Young Love is one of the bigger returns to form you’ll hear. From the second you press play, you’ll notice that Kearney plays to the strengths that make his music unique and, more than that, takes some clever steps forward with his sound. “Hey Mama” starts things off with a far more quirky and upbeat feel. It works brilliantly. “Ships in the Night” revisits the tense acoustic hip-hop of Kearney’s first album. Reggae and pop elements sneak in elsewhere, and it all makes for a really enjoyable record.

It’s not like there aren’t missteps (“Sooner Or Later” is carbon-copy One Republic), but you’ll forgive them because this is a genuinely head-nodding and smile-inducing album.

Four and a half stars out of five