PHONY – Heater | Album Review

Counter Intuitive Records

I’m a known short album enjoyer, and Heater, the new album from PHONY, just might be the best example ever. The record is a scant nine songs that add up to a grand total of 21 minutes; that’s just two minutes longer than I Became Birds or your favorite Joyce Manor album. It makes sense then, that in 2021, the latter would enlist Neil Berthier to play guitar and synth in support of their then-upcoming record 40 oz. to Fresno.

While his ongoing Joyce Manor tenure might net him a lot of cred in millennial emo circles, Berthier has been creating excellent records under the PHONY moniker as far back as 2019. That’s not to mention the half-decade he spent fronting the now-defunct Donovan Wolfington. So it should come as no surprise that Heater is as refined and punctual as it is. This is the sound of someone who’s been at it for over a decade, and this album specifically sees PHONY refining the pop-punk formula into a glossy collection of shredders that are pointed, addicting, and deliver a complete arc within the time it takes to watch an episode of Spongebob. 

Things kick off with “Caroline,” a re-recording of a song initially released as a one-off single last year as a prelude to PHONY’s third album. While I had assumed Caroline was doomed to obscurity as a non-album loosie, it’s nice to hear the song here perched at the onset of a new record, gaining a well-deserved second life in the process. In comparing the two versions, it’s fascinating how they each embody their respective “eras” so well: while the 2022 Caroline is still peppy and energetic, it fits better in the disaffected, disorienting, and death-obsessed world of the album that came after it. In contrast, the 2023 Caroline is snappier and scrappier, with a brighter vocal take that signals to longtime fans they’re in for something different than last year. 

Following this revisitation of an old single-name classic, PHONY spends the remainder of Side A ripping through the album’s three singles in reverse order. “Card In A Spoke” springs to life with a bouncy drum pattern that sounds like a dribbling basketball or a heartily-thrown dodgeball. This is only the warm-up though, because everything explodes to life when the rest of the instruments slam into the track about 24 seconds in. Wielding a snotty pop-punk riff and hard-charging rhythm section, Berthier desperately searches for signs of life and a sense of time following a crashlanding on alien terrain. The group can hardly wait a minute before getting to a guitar solo and then rolling back into the chorus again, ironically making the listener also feel like a card in a spoke getting beaten with the repeated prongs of energy stemming from the band. 

“World You Love” begins with a waltz but quickly builds into a full-body ballroom sway as images of bloody sidewalks and brain-frying boardwalks flash between cathartic cries of “REALLY WHO GIVES A SHIT!?” One proggy guitar solo later, and we’re dumped off into “Chinatown,” the album’s lead single and one of my favorite songs of the year. Perhaps the closest to the maudlin vocal stylings of AT SOME POINT YOU STOP, this song has a fun drum beat and attention-grabbing opening moment as Berthier explains to some faceless other, “You were built for speed, and I was built to last.” From there, the song slides headfirst into a jumpy punk section as we hear tales of sunshine and tequila shots delivered in an enthusiastic shout. 

After a pretty relentless outpouring of energy over the first ten minutes, “Roof” acts as a solitary moment of reflection before jumping into the record’s back half. Based around a simple piano line, this track is the perfectly placed interlude slotted right in the middle of the album and almost feels like a mirror to last year’s “KALEIDOSCOPE.” More a scene-setting exploration of drunkenness and disconnection, some studio chatter punctuates the minute-long excursion before the album’s remaining four songs swoop us back into the pop-punk mayhem.

Just as was the case with the first half of the album, almost each of the songs on Side B boasts a catchy hook, cocky vocal delivery, and flashy guitar solo. Things rarely dip below 100 bpm, “Water In Your Wine Glass” is the closest thing the album gets to a “slow song,” and even then, PHONY can’t help but build up to a snappy little guitar solo midway through. Similarly, “County Line” eases into things with a somber beginning, but that only lasts about 20 seconds when the band roars to life for the chorus. 

Heater resolves on “Pass The Ball,” a song that touches on touring life, alcoholism, and learning how to commit to something. To me, this song is really about partnership and learning how to share yourself with someone else, whether that be in a romantic, platonic, or creative setting. The lyrics promise, “You could really have it all / if you learn to pass the goddamn ball.” This mantra is delivered calmly at first but then in a near-scream by the end. As the title of the song is repeated, the guitar crescendoes into a post-rock wall of noise and, most shockingly, some Sweater-Song-esque “oooh ooohs” appear to sing the listener off. All in all, it’s a very big swing that ends up feeling like the perfect closer to a blisteringly fast record. 

I know I’ve talked a lot about the speed and tempo of these songs, but it’s surprising just how amazingly everything flows when placed together. These tracks feel like an amazing synthesis of emo and pop-punk, all delivered in a style that feels true to this project and Berthier’s last ten-ish years of music-making. It’s stunning to hear an album this complete and fulfilling delivered in just 21 minutes, and the crazy thing is you can just let it all roll from the top again.

Up until now, I haven’t talked too much about AT SOME POINT YOU STOP, the PHONY album that came out before this one. That record was one of my favorites of 2022 and fleshed out a world of emotional indie rock unlike any I’ve ever heard. While it was an album about death, loss, and reconfiguration, the bigger question it leaves the listener with is what comes after. Heater, it turns out, answers that question with an emphatic collection of songs where life flashes by at superspeed. These songs are the sound of someone experiencing existence after a sort of cosmic reset that rendered everything before it null. They’re fast because that’s exactly how things unfold in the real world. When I throw on this record and the songs each blaze past me, I’m reminded of this fact. Everything is fleeting, and we’re just lucky to be here taking in the scenery—a card in the spoke, flickering along and enjoying the ride for as long as we can.

Frog – Grog | Album Review

tapewormies

The sailors survived off rum. Not in the nutritional sense, of course, but in the way one may survive by watching their favorite sports team. Everybody needs a little something to get through the day. The problem arose when the sailors realized they could stockpile their daily rum rations for two, three, four days at a time and then drink themselves silly. Eighteenth-century British naval ships were dangerous operations, and drunk or hungover sailors posed a threat to everybody’s safety. An enterprising admiral named Edward Vernon began mixing fresh water into the rum rations in a 4:1 ratio, shortening the liquor’s shelf life and thus forcing the sailors to consume responsibly. Vernon’s concoction took on his own nickname: Grog, after the grogham cloth he wore around his waist.

Daniel Bateman has always operated in this space, writing fiercely humanist songs under the moniker Frog about the ways in which people mete out coping mechanisms to survive. In the intervening years after 2019’s Count Bateman, his wife gave birth to twins. Faced with the twin specters of newfound responsibility in fatherhood and a pandemic-wracked world, Bateman suddenly found he needed to dig deeper within himself to be able to write and escape into his music; in this regard, it’s fitting that the fifth Frog album is titled Grog, after the beverage which kept the sailors able to focus on the tasks at hand. Grog is, in many ways, a culmination of the greater Frog project: a refinement of the musical and lyrical themes Bateman has pursued his whole career, with fuller arrangements and a bounce that never quite materialized on older records. It also marks the band’s first go-round as a family affair, with Bateman’s brother Steve taking over full-time on drums.

“Goes w/o Saying,” the first proper song on the album, is one in a long tradition of Frog songs that cloaks sexual pursuit in vaguely religious language. But this time, they let the instrumental—a series of chiming pianos—ride out for over a minute after Bateman stops singing until the song starts to sound like hourly church bells collapsing inward on themselves. It’s a new trick for the group, the music now working in greater tandem with the lyrics. Lead single “Black on Black on Black” rides a ferocious stomping groove as Bateman works in abstract notions about Odysseus and Athena. He’s long been obsessed with the modern American myth—2015’s Kind of Blah namechecks Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, MGM, and Patrick Ewing all within a three-song run—but this dive into more classic mythology represents a new frontier. Rather than using pop cultural knowledge as evocative shorthand, he taps into some of the oldest shared cultural knowledge available as a world-building device.

But Grog’s most salient change is Bateman’s status as a new parent. Where his prior character sketches often dealt with fumbling young adulthood in pseudo-autobiography, with all the impulsive drugs and awkward sex that entails, he’s trained his gaze on a younger generation this time around. “420!!” is a melancholy guitar symphony of adolescent shenanigans and early pot-smoking laced with a morbid undercurrent: “You’re gonna die, and yeah, it’s cool / You don’t know why you’re going to school.” It’s a weed-addled bildungsroman in miniature that recalls what its characters are experiencing in real-time: a firmer (and maybe sadder) understanding of the human condition undercut by buzzed euphoria that borders on acceptance. Fatherhood is tackled most explicitly on the tender “Ur Still Mine,” a musing where Bateman imagines talking to a fellow parent before offering words of encouragement to his own kids. “New Ro” lands a bit closer to the Frog songs of prior albums, a bluegrass romp that flashes back to his hometown “where the girls they put out in a car/and the pizza guys know who you are.” 

Everything converges on the stunning closer “Gone Back to Stanford,” a bleary vignette about a college underclassman having trouble adjusting to the next phase of her life. Like many of the best Frog songs, “Gone Back to Stanford” is a series of images that stops just short of adding up to a story, littered with asides, non-sequiturs, and foreboding undercurrents. This unnamed person goes to parties and drinks Ketel One and has unfulfilling one-night stands; through it, she’s trying to work up the nerve to tell her mother she wants to transfer out. Bateman fleshes out the scenes beautifully, able to capture the pain and elation and danger of these environments from afar without ever passing judgment; paternal, but never paternalistic. It’s also the most richly arranged song of the band’s career–never before have they been able to execute the kind of drop they pull off at the end with as much heft as they manage here. They bring it home on one of Bateman’s best turns of phrase over his years of writing about lost innocence: “Born in a manger/Going home with a stranger.”

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Jason Sloan is a guy from Brooklyn by way of Long Island. You can find him on Twitter or occasionally rambling at Tributary.

Hotline TNT – Cartwheel | Album Review

Third Man Records

I was 20 years old when I first found out about Weed… The band, not the substance.

I used to hang out at the record store where I currently work when- one day, a used copy of Running Back by Weed came in. When Dollhands (now Clearbody) put out our first EP, the label that pressed tapes for us compared our music to Weed, but I thought it was just a joke and not an actual band. As soon as this record was staring me in the face, I knew I had to buy it without a second thought. Sure enough, I got home, threw Running Back on my record player, and it changed my outlook on music forever. I had never heard anything like this collection of songs; I had found my first holy grail of a record. 

I think Will Anderson understands that feeling more than most people in bands do. Hotline TNT did an Audiotree Far Out back in 2019, this was my first exposure to the group. Having already spent countless hours with Weed’s KEXP session, I quickly realized that this was Will’s new band, and needless to say, I was an instant fan. The first thing I did after watching that Audiotree was open up Spotify and type in Hotline TNT- to my surprise, nothing showed up. I then searched YouTube and found out that the only way to get these songs was to download them through a Mediafire link in the description of Fireman’s Carry. Back then, the only way to hear Hotline TNT was through YouTube, vinyl, or this janky Mediafire link. I grew up torrenting on Limewire, so this wasn’t a foreign process to me, in fact, it felt special like I was the only person that had this on their phone. 

All this to say, I’ve been closely watching the metamorphosis of this band, and Cartwheel feels like a victory lap after the longest possible NASCAR race of all time. The band is firing on all cylinders here, and with a bare-bones 33-minute runtime, not a moment is wasted. This record blends the perfect mix of cool style, cuteness, and loud-ass fuckin guitars. The textures of guitar tone are unlike anything I’ve heard in any other album, 100 other bands could try all the studio wizardry in the world and not achieve sounds like these. At its core, the tone sounds like it’s being built with an acoustic guitar, but it’s fuzzed out to the max. I especially love the color the 12-string adds on “Stump,” the record’s heartfelt closer. 

Cartwheel starts with the first two singles, “Protocol” and “I Thought You’d Change.” I was lucky enough to first hear “Protocol” last year when I saw Hotline open for Snail Mail and Momma. The song blew my mind then, and it somehow still does every time I hear it. My favorite track on the record is “Spot Me 100,” the way Will starts the song with “Squad car, caught you on the Autobahn” really does something for me. The lyrics are buried underneath all the layers of guitar, as God intended, but when one slips through the wall, it sticks with you for the rest of the runtime.

When you break down all the songs on this record, it’s the old man’s definition of Shoegaze, simply pop songs that are played deafeningly loud. Personally, I love how skewed the meaning of shoegaze has become; the genre can truly be whatever the artist (or the listener) wants it to be. Some people will call this a lo-fi record, maybe even just a rock record, but to me, this is the closest anyone has gotten to making our generation’s Loveless. Cartwheel is easily my favorite record that’s come out this year, even the interlude track is a contender for one of the best songs this year. 

After being a fan for so long, this LP exceeded my already high expectations. Cartwheel is a career-defining album for Hotline TNT. I love seeing this band win, I love it whenever I go to their Spotify page and see those monthlies go up. They’ve been grinding for years at this point and have been playing the game their way, and it’s really inspiring for someone like me to see that you can do it YOUR way. Being in a band is hard work, it took me the better part of two years to write songs for my band’s last release, so I can hear all the love and hard work that went into Cartwheel. I often think about how we’ll view records 20 years down the road; the process of putting out an album is so quick, and sometimes it feels like people forget about music a week after its release, but this is not one of those records. Even though it’s only a few weeks old at this point, it’s clear that Cartwheel will easily be a touchstone of this era of music.

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My name is Eric Smeal, and I play in a band called Clearbody. We put out a record called Bend Into a Blur earlier this year, and I’m very proud of it. We play shows and tour sometimes, but right now, I’m just out here living life, writing our next record, working my day job, taking photos, etc. My handle everywhere is @amplifierwrship, thanks for reading!

Carpool – Can We Just Get High? / Gulfer – Clean | Double Single Review

Ah, November 15th: a Wednesday that will go down in history as the day we got new singles from venerable emo projects Carpool and Gulfer. Truly a duet of pleasures. Funny enough, even though these are unrelated singles from completely disconnected bands, the titles play off each other in a way that feels like a hilarious coincidence. As a diehard, insatiable emo freak who’s been a fan of both groups for years, today is as good as a national holiday.

First up, Carpool’s “Can We Just Get High?” is a scuzzy dirtbag anthem that asks the exact question posed in its title. The Rochester emo group wastes no time, blasting in immediately with a bouncy two-note pop-punk riff and lyrics that lay out the entire spectrum of human emotion as lead singer Stoph Colasanto shouts, “Love me / hate me / don’t care, can we just get high?” 

This single immediately feels right at home in Carpool’s discography, continuing themes found in some of the band’s best songs, touching on drug use, escapism, and codependency, but still somehow making those topics fun enough to sing along to. Just the first taste of the band’s upcoming sophomore album, “Can We Just Get High,” is the boisterous sound of a party that’s just getting started. As you would expect from any endorphin-expending night out, the comedown is soon to follow, which actually leads beautifully to…

Gulfer’s “Clean” arrives with a magnanimous video that aims to wring the last moments of sun-soaked joy out of the summer. We watch as the Québécois emo group jump into a backyard pool, instruments and all, as the lyrics weave the tale of Nicki, a disillusioned office worker caught in the endless loop of work/home/repeat. 

Moving a half-step away from the emo tappiness of their most recent singles, one-offs, and splits, “Clean” has a sunny sway that shows an unexpectedly poppy side of Gulfer. As the video moves from poolside to the band members lounging around a cozy plant-adorned house, tensions mount as a second layer of harsher vocals get layered onto the final verse, making for a scintillating reminder of why Gulfer are one of the greatest emo bands to ever do it. 

Puppy Angst: One Year of Scorpio Season

Dreamy, gazey Philadelphia rockers Puppy Angst celebrated one year of their debut LP Scorpio Season, hitting the road on an East Coast tour and releasing a vinyl edition to commemorate the occasion. Swim Into The Sound spoke with lead vocalist Alyssa Milman as they looked back on the genesis, recording, and touring of this creative and impressive contribution to indie rock. 

Milman was a founding member of bands Blushed and Past Life and has played as a touring member of Kississippi. They noted that touring with Kississippi and other bands has been a deeply generative experience, which helped shape and focus their sights on their own musical projects. 

“As of April 2022, Puppy Angst is my only band. It’s why I left Kississippi. Having those experiences on the stage as we played… definitely shaped me as a musician, in the sense that it taught me what tour was really like,” said Milman. “It was a whirlwind and definitely changed things for me. I had never played on a stage that big. It just [gave] me a bit of a hunger to have this band get to do that stuff, too.”

Puppy Angst is a rollicking rock outfit suffused with youthful energy and tenderness, nurturing both brashness and vulnerability. Milman described the sound as “like if Mannequin Pussy or Bully was a shoegaze band.” To my ear, it also recalls glam rock and pop-punk while being something entirely original.

The band’s grounding in the Philadelphia rock ecosystem is one of Puppy Angst’s great strengths. Every member in the band besides Milman is in other projects; drummer Eric Naroden is the frontman of In Lieu of Roses, synth player Pauli Mia is the frontwoman of Twin Princess, and bassist John Heywood tours with indie superstar Alex G. Guitarist Dan Leinweber played alongside Milman in Blushed, and makes ambient music under the name greenspace. “It is cool to have this intricate web,” said Milman. “A band family. Bands-in-law, as [synth player] Pauli would say.”

For Scorpio Season, Puppy Angst’s debut album, the creative process was a mix of gradual cultivation and rapid finalization. The songs were written slowly, starting in 2019 and continuing over the next three years. Lead single “Yellow Paint,” a catchy and dynamic song, which offers an early high point on the album. The revving guitars deliver energy and strength, while the warbling synths add a layer of gauzy beauty and complexity.

“‘Yellow Paint,’ as soon as I wrote it, I was like “this is the one. This is the greatest song I’ve ever written!” Milman adds, “It was one of those moments where I was like “I can’t believe I wrote that.”

Writing the album was as much a process of transmogrifying old songs as it was coming up with new material; some of the songs, like “Aftermath,” had been reworked from early versions performed with previous bands.

“‘Aftermath’ was a really fast [song], it fit the Blushed world of the surf punk, super quick, chaotic type of thing, which we do a lot of in Puppy Angst! But something about it felt wrong to just take the song that Blushed wrote and record it verbatim on our album,” said Milman. “To record it, I wanted it to be a new song while still honoring some of that old song, like put it into the Puppy Angst world while also not taking too much from what Blushed did in the past.”

In contrast to the slow and intricate writing process, recording was done in a flash, with the band eager to finish the record in time for an (on-brand) Scorpio season release. “We went into Headroom Studios, just me, John, and Eric. We got all the drums and bass done in a day and a half,” said Milman. 

Additional recording took place in the home studio of the sound engineer Joanna Baumann with the help of Dan Leinweber while Milman left for tour with Kississippi. “I was worried I just wouldn’t have the time or the creative energy to write all these guitar parts for an album, but I knew I wanted to have the bottom layers on it, to make it really textural, really lush,” said Milman.

“We finished mixing it in the summer of 2022 and put it out on October 24, 2022. So it was a long-winded process, but in the end, it was really quick,” said Milman. “I wanted it to be called Scorpio Season, I’d had this plan for so long… I wanted it to be for the fall and winter, I wanted it to match the season it came out in.”

The album indeed carries a punchy melancholy that feels appropriate for the autumn months; the album is colored with themes of both decay and renewal, a certain bitterness and pain, and is tempered with perspective and reflection. Even the songs that are by no means soft carry an unshakable vulnerability; on “Your Bones,” Milman sings, “I would’ve comforted you, I would’ve comforted you, but… you would never do the same.” The strong doses of anguish and abandon make the record feel at home in the darkest months of the year.

After the album’s release, the band embarked on an extensive tour, playing everything from college radio shows to two official showcases as South By Southwest.

“Our two official showcases were so, so much better than I ever could have imagined. Packed rooms! It was bizarre!” recounts Milman. “There were shows where the venue staff and bartenders were buying our merch. I was like, ‘You guys see so many bands! It’s so wild you would want to buy a tee shirt from us.’ That felt very affirming.”

The smaller shows were also memorable, with Milman noting that the younger audiences carry different (higher!) energy. “We played a really insane house show where Pauli was scared her beer was going to get knocked over by kids moshing,” Milman recalls, laughing.

Ultimately, the tour’s success has represented more than a good record; it represents a validation of individual and collective ambition, a deserved reward for Milman and the band’s dedication. In this way, Scorpio Season is a triumph, both personal and artistic.

“It’s been a really long process of realizing that I can put my own art, my creative pursuit first, it can be my first priority, and I can be all in on it,” said Milman. “Sometimes I feel like I’m making a fool out of myself. But then, on this tour, I was like, “No, the dream is happening! This is the dream.”

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Elizabeth is a neuroscience researcher in Chicago. She writes about many things—art, the internet, apocalyptic thought, genetically modified mice–on her substack handgun.substack.com. She is from Northern Nevada.