worlds greatest dad – Better Luck Next Time | Album Review
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SideOneDummy Records
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what we mean when we talk about a band maturing. With artists from the past, the subject is often clear cut; if you listen to Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash followed by Don’t Tell a Soul, it’s not difficult to pick out which of the two was made by kids, and when you listen to the records that came in between the two, it’s easy to see the progression that took us from one to the next. With newer bands, especially those that are still active, the conversation becomes a little more gray. In the realm of emo-adjacent music, I often see maturation used to describe a band whose newest release features fewer of the genre’s stylistic hallmarks than the one that came before it. It seems if you turn down the knob that says “emo” and turn up the knob that says “indie,” you're bound to have your record described as your most mature yet.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this assessment when I see it, but I do wish that the way bands progress was talked about more from other angles. Maturation doesn’t always present as a band becoming more stripped down or reserved. Sometimes, it can look like further commitment to a style or adding new elements without subtracting others. It can be a band growing into their identity rather than moving towards what others might think “mature” sounds like. This is the kind of maturation I thought about when listening to worlds greatest dad’s new album, Better Luck Next Time.
Better Luck Next Time is the group’s second full-length and their first since 2018’s get well soon. A lot happened in the six years between the releases, including a lineup of Kegan Krogh, Ben Etter, and Matt Hendler coalescing around bandleader Maddie Duncan, as well as the four signing with SideOneDummy earlier this year. Despite how much time has passed, Better Luck Next Time feels like a natural sequel to get well soon, improving on what came before without moving too far away from the band’s sound.
Where moments on get well soon caught my attention, moments on Better Luck Next Time go a step further and knock me over. Album opener “Twenty Deer” starts with a minute of wistful vocals over acoustic and slide guitar, then, suddenly, the full band enters, and you’re hit with crashing drums and a strong, luminous guitar lead. Beyond sounding huge, when the instruments come together here, they sound clear; you can hear every part and how it compliments the whole with washes of reverb and subtle synths acting as a bed for everything else to lay in.
This balance can be found throughout the whole album and allows the guitar leads, in particular, to shine. On the intro of “Bike Song” and chorus of “Concrete (A Love Song),” the guitar is the locomotive that pulls everything along, and its placement in the mix allows for a tone that’s strong and ear-catching without being abrasive. On “Taking One for the Team,” the lead takes prominence during the first hook in a more complimentary role, still strong but deployed to dance around the main vocal line before joining up with strings and the more prominent bass of the verses. Most of these elements have been there in past worlds greatest dad releases but generally with fewer, more compressed layers. Here, we see the songwriting and arrangements bloom fully, a more substantial structure built on similar bones.
The scale of the songs here sometimes gives Better Luck Next Time an almost stadium rock quality. “Two Birds,” in particular, is a song that feels grandiose, pairing its massive sound with one of the record’s best hooks; Duncan singing, “Cause I was watchin’ when your head fell from the clouds / And you could correct me now if I was what knocked your feet off of the ground” is something I haven’t been able to get out of my head since my first listen. Fourth single, “The Ocean,” is another song with a huge earworm chorus that feels made for radio, with the instrumentation around the hook made extra lush thanks to the more staccato sections that precede it. Sometimes, with bands in this lane, you wonder how the sound will translate to larger stages when the time comes, but that’s not a worry when listening to Better Luck Next Time. These are big songs that feel like they’re meant to be performed in front of big crowds.
One of the more reserved tracks on the album that really stuck with me was “Fakin’ a Smile.” Part of why many of the tracks on Better Luck Next Time sound so big is the masterful use of vocal doubles, reverb, and harmonies, allowing Duncan’s voice to contend with the big instrumentation surrounding it. This always sounds cool, but it’s nice on tracks like “Fakin’ A Smile,” where we hear a bit more raw vocal that highlights the pure quality of their voice. The little vocal quiver we hear as Duncan sings, “I don’t think I can get out of bed” right before the chorus is just so good; it’s the kind of vocal affect that can sound trite if overdone, but here it’s executed so perfectly that you feel it in your gut.
Continuing into that song’s chorus, we’re hit with some of my favorite lines on the album, as Duncan sings, “And I got so drunk that I turned sober / And my stomach soured over / And I felt the floor fall with me.” I don’t know that I’ve heard a more succinct distillation of the moment that you realize that you’re too drunk and the consequences that come with it, particularly when your intention for drinking was to escape or find comfort. When the realization hits that the comfort’s not coming, but you’re already deep into a bottle, it really can send you into freefall, which is described perfectly here.
One thing that’s tough about being in your late teens and early twenties is that you often engage in these cycles of behavior but aren’t equipped to fully identify them. I don’t think lyrics or realizations like those on “Fakin’ a Smile” generally can come from someone in the early throes of young adulthood, even though they’re related to behaviors and experiences that come in that part of your life.
I feel similarly about the lines “It wasn’t that you gave up on your dreams / But at the same time you stopped believing in me” from “Bad Neighborhood” and plenty of other sections throughout the record. So much of the lyrical content feels like it can be summed up as reckoning with the inevitable mistakes one made when they were younger, specifically the type of reckoning that can only come with some time and distance. This ultimately is one of the things that really got me thinking about maturity when I was listening through. Better Luck Next Time is an album of progression for worlds greatest dad both sonically and emotionally. It’s their most mature record yet, and also their best.
Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. You can keep up with his writing on music and sports on Twitter and listen to his band Cutaway Car here.
