At My Teenage Worst

IMU often helps me stretch my brain a little bit and improve my ability to write other things. But if I focus on those other things instead of IMU, does the quality taper off? What about if I focus on another project, ostensibly because it is tangible and "more important", but that leads to me putting this, my main writing output, to the side? Am I still producing if I have nothing to show for it here? What if work through things in a notebook instead of a computer screen?

This is all very confusing to me (and you, I'm sure), so the only sensible thing to do is a short post about some new music I'm into.

As always, around April I was worried that I wasn't putting enough effort into finding new music and was entering the dreaded first stage of "becoming out of touch". Nothing terrifies white males more than potentially not knowing things about pop music. As always, once the warm weather started, releases I like slowly started to creep in. It's almost as if record labels release things during the summer on purpose.




I'm really into the new Sidekicks album Happiness Hours. I absolutely adored Weight of Air and Awkward Breeds, but was underwhelmed by Runners in the Nerved World. I was ready to write the band off and exclusively celebrate their early material, but then they pulled the ultimate feat and came back with a huge return to form. It's way different from the albums I loved, but heavy on melody, choruses, and riffs that are great without being technical. I tried to think of other times that bands have come back with a big bounce-back after something I didn't like and the first example I thought of was the Swellers album Good For Me. The two bands couldn't be more different, but they are the same in this way. That's neat.




After the sublime full length Tired of Tomorrow, Nothing just released the lead single for their next album Dance on the Blacktop. I'm mostly over the shoegaze trend in punk and find that most bands just end up putting out boring album that lack hooks, but Nothing bucks that the hardest a band can. They manage to find the overlap between gaze, hardcore, grunge, and britpop that most bands think they do. Excited for this one.




Guys, you had me at "New Heart Crew, Midwest Straight Edge".