I Hate How Much I Want You (featuring Phil Collen & Joe Elliott)

You are locked into The Zoo, the station that still believes a chorus ought to knock the plaster off the wall, and right now the plaster is in trouble. The Struts come stomping out of Derby with “I Hate How Much I Want You,” the Def Leppard collision off Strange Days, and if you have ever stood in a room where the handclaps arrived before the second verse, this one was built for you. Luke Spiller does not tiptoe into the thing. He opens it with a staged phone bit, the kind of skit he told Joe Elliott he wanted because the old rap records used to announce the guest before a note had landed. Spiller pitches a big fat chorus. Elliott, who Spiller calls the king of the Leps, answers that he is in. Two takes in May, and the door is kicked down.

The song is a tale of love lost and maddening lust, Spiller trading lines with Elliott while Phil Collen piles guitar on top of Adam Slack’s. The chorus is a gang chant dressed as a grudge. You do not want her. You want her anyway. Spiller later told Forbes it sat with the super-Slade, stomp-your-feet, Sweet side of the record, and he was not kidding. He also said Phil and Joe gave it so much personality that it sounds like a timeless glam rock stomper your mum sang along to in the Seventies. Collen’s own line was better: mutual, mischievous, explosive rowdiness. Elliott said he agreed before he even knew what Spiller wanted, that he had been a fan since the band first broke in the States in late 2015, and that the track made him feel like a kid again. That is not press-release fog. That is a Sheffield singer volunteering for somebody else’s hook.

The Struts are Luke Spiller on vocals, Adam Slack on guitar, Jed Elliott on bass, and Gethin Davies on drums. Spiller grew up in Bristol in a Christian house where gospel was the playlist until Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall cracked the door. He did not start singing until he was sixteen. Slack came out of Derby, already writing riffs in teenage bands that were falling apart. They met in 2009, when Spiller was living in Clevedon, and the chemistry was immediate. By 2012 the lineup had settled into the four who still own the name. Early shows were costume changes, platform attitude, and a frontman who had clearly studied Freddie Mercury without trying to photocopy him. They opened for the Rolling Stones before they had a debut album in the shops. That is not a rumor the band invented later. That is how fast the live reputation outran the catalog.

Everybody Wants arrived in Britain in 2014 and got a wider American push in 2016, carried by “Could Have Been Me,” the platinum-certified anthem that parked itself in the alternative top five and introduced a band that sounded like 1974 had been left in a hot car with a stack of Queen singles. Young & Dangerous followed in 2018, tighter, still theatrical, still allergic to irony. Then 2020 shut the road. The plan, Spiller has said more than once, was ten days in Los Angeles for an EP, maybe three or four songs. They tested clear, landed at producer Jon Levine’s house on April 24, slept on air mattresses, and wrote like the lease was up. By day four they had six or seven songs. By day seven the arrangements were comped. Spiller spent the last three days on vocals. Nine originals and a cover came out of a session that was supposed to be a stopgap. Strange Days landed on October 16, 2020, through Interscope, and entered the UK album chart at number 11, the highest placement of their career.

“I Hate How Much I Want You” was the single that dropped on October 8, ahead of the album. Levine produced and shares the writing with Spiller, Slack, Davies, and Jed Elliott. Claudius Mittendorfer mixed it. Emily Lazar and Chris Allgood mastered it. The phone intro is fiction played straight. Spiller told Kerrang the ten-day deadline in that skit was the actual schedule. He had been emailing Elliott for years. The guests on Strange Days were people the band already knew: Robbie Williams on the title track, which began as a 2019 tour-bus voice memo and got its Britpop shape after Williams called in during a quarantine livestream; Tom Morello on “Wild Child”; Albert Hammond Jr. on “Another Hit of Showmanship.” The Kiss cover, “Do You Love Me,” almost wore the Leppard cameo instead. Spiller was a fan of the version by Girl, Collen’s band before Def Leppard, and the original idea was to put Joe and Phil on that one. A poolside stall in the session turned into the cover. The glam stomper got the guests. The Kiss song got the band on its own.

That swap matters. “I Hate How Much I Want You” did not need a heritage badge to work, but the badge fits the furniture. Collen’s soloing is the extra voltage, not a guest spot taped on at the end. Elliott does not hover in the margins. He splits the vocal, which is why the chorus feels like two frontmen arguing with the same woman and losing. Spiller writes choruses by sitting at a piano and waving his arms, imagining a room already singing. If he can hear the crowd, the hook stays. This one stayed. On a record he has called the most glam they had made, it is the track that stops pretending to be anything else. Strange Days also holds Stones-ish roll, a heavier turn with Morello, and a closer that leans disco-rock. The band was not under orders to cut radio singles. They cut one anyway, then watched UK radio finally catch up.

Put the needle on the jealousy. He is not asking where she has been. He is asking whether she is telling the new man the things she told him. He has never been the jealous type, which is what people say right before the kick drum proves them wrong. The title is the whole psychology. Hate is the costume. Want is the song. Glam has always been good at that costume. Slade did it with boots. The Sweet did it with stack heels. The Struts do it with a Derby rhythm section and a Bristol singer who still treats a chorus like a public service. Davies hits like a man who knows the handclaps are coming. Jed Elliott keeps the low end swaggering instead of grim. Slack and Collen trade the bright, nasty guitar language that made British hard pop dangerous in the first place.

If you are new to the catalog, start with Everybody Wants and hear how “Could Have Been Me” and “Kiss This” built the room this song walks into. Then play Young & Dangerous and notice the confidence. Strange Days is the one they made when the rules were off and the clock was cruel, and it is the one that finally put them in the UK top twenty. Later records, including Pretty Vicious, kept the live reputation that got them on Stones stages before they had a debut. None of that erases the fact that a lockdown record cut in ten days at a producer’s house still contains the best pure stomper in their book. Joe Elliott did not lend his voice to a novelty. He lent it to a chorus he would have fought for in 1979.

The Zoo is spinning it because the station still programs for people who can hear the difference between a feature and a fit. This is a fit. Spiller asked for personality and got a record that sounds like it has been on the jukebox longer than the band has been alive. That is the trick glam still knows how to pull, and The Struts pulled it with the two Leppard members who understood the assignment before the red light was on. Crank it. The chorus does not ask permission.

More from the station lives at The Zoo. The band keeps the official camp at thestruts.com, on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans gather with the Strutters group on Facebook and over on Reddit.