From Isabel: Teenage angst! Natasha Lyonne references! Germ theory!
Isabel Cole: Songs that evoke the teen years by number tend do so as a metonym for giddiness or abandon, conjuring and shading in gold the rush of first love or an adolescent sense of infinite possibility. I’m not immune to this kind of nostalgia, but I still wanted to shout Finally! Somebody gets it! the first time I heard “you make me wish that I was dead / you’re just like being seventeen again.” But this isn’t a song about being seventeen; it’s a song about something even worse: being twenty-three. Twenty-three is old enough to regret your misspent youth, all those “football boys I could have been if I hadn’t been so short and spineless,” and too young to see how much of it yet lies ahead; old enough to be sick of your bad habits, too young to imagine a life without them; old enough to know better, too young to stop. Listening from far on the other side of thirty, I can’t help but hear the toxic, infuriating, addictive relationship that powers the central tension of the song as a symptom of a larger malaise, palpable from the opening line’s nod to a sticky September in the age of climate change and viscerally felt in the way the vocals vacillate between anxious little figure-eights around the same cluster of notes and sputtering outbursts of rage. And yet the song isn’t a drag; instead it’s powered by a restless, infectious energy that comes not just from all the high-tempo banging but from Juno Moreno’s voice, which ricochets from wistful huskiness to all out screaming that’s cathartic and manages to be funny, too; my favorite note in their performance is the conversational exasperation in the bit about catching a cold, but shrieking YOU HAVE A BAD ATTITUDE!is a close second. In the bridge the song, listing off artifacts of memory, names broken records and then becomes one, shouting I still love you on repeat as we loop back to the beginning once more, endless summer and our own useless hearts an ouroboros from which there is no escape. That’s more or less how I remember twenty-three, too.
[9]
Alfred Soto: I hope listeners read the artist name and song title as a continuous clause. The punkish strumming works, the inchoate shrieks does the business.
[7]
Taylor Alatorre: The song crackles with an incipient awareness that the statute of limitations for its teenage grievances is about to run out. They can still be prosecuted after one’s mid-20s, but with limited degrees of success unless you’re in a legacy pop punk band. Sorry Mom are more concerned with of-the-moment impulse than self-conscious legacy-building, an approach that’s typified by their shouted re-enactments of still-fresh arguments. Intended as a jolt of comic naturalism, this instead comes off as rehearsed spontaneity, unneeded in a song that’s already brimming with off-the-cuff energy. “Seventeen again,” both vague and specific in the way it means something different to everyone, is the hero swooping in to stay this rattling bundle of feelings on course.
[6]
Jel Bugle: A fairly straightforward punk-pop song, I felt it lacked an extra bit of ommphhh to go a bit harder. Like needed some kind of blistering guitar solo (but I think this about most songs), that would make it a 7 for me. Good that they are pointing out that you don’t get a cold from being cold; people thinking this is a personal bugbear of mine, too.
[6]
Aaron Bergstrom: I am a firm believer in both (a) science and (b) queer punk bands that sound like DIY Josie and the Pussycats with a sense of humor. Neither has been able to shake my conviction that you actually can catch a cold from being cold.
[8]
Nortey Dowuona: Juno Moreno at guitar and vocals seems to bury the song below her frustrated, ham fisted poetry, but Taryn Skye’s heavy, boulder drumming gives them a weight and agility, especially once the chorus flies out of the heavy mire to flutter near the top of Moreno’s range, as well as her heavier voice boosting Moreno during the chorus and during the verses, with her light, tender tapping on the hi hats floating the song during the bridge, the crashing on the cymbals a welcome shattering of the song during the outro.
[7]
John S. Quinn-Puerta: A song that captures high school in the anguished yet nostalgic way so perfectly that it made me open Ticketmaster, down to the staccato pulse of the guitars and the beautiful close harmonies.
[9]
Leah Isobel: No knock on Sorry Mom, who are very good at what they’re doing, but I just don’t have much time for this purposely adolescent angst-indie anymore. Happy for the baby queers who are going to have a blast moshing to this at their college radio station’s spring concert though!
[5]
Dave Moore: The feeling I have listening to this is like when I watch recent cartoons with my kids — you usually see where the influences all came from, but the whole world is different around it. For one thing, the baseline quality is so much higher (especially if the creator or showrunner is a woman). But also, because the primary audience is kids, no one’s really even meant to understand what an improvement this is. I sometimes feel a little envious that I can’t go back in time and have it be a primary source in my own formative years, and not only that, but for no one to even have to comment on it — it’s no big deal at all. Wasn’t it always like this?
[8]
Katherine St. Asaph: I have tried for hours to figure out what Jawbreaker soundtrack-core chick-rock band this reminds me of. (Fastbacks? Tuscadero? Veruca Salt is too obvious, right?) I really don’t know why it’s taking me so long considering how much of my life I’ve spent listening to the stuff.
[8]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: My personal biases cause me to think this is extremely 2017 — but if I would have loved it then, why not love it now, too? This is harder and scrappier than the songs it reminds me of the most from last decade; the guitars storm in like this is a Gun Club track (or, like, the Japandroids cover of that one Gun Club track?) and they don’t let up the tempo for a second. There’s no real loud-quiet-loud dynamism here, swapped out for an endurance test of power chords and increasingly feverish teenage observations.
[8]
Brad Shoup: Several parts here where I wanted to shout GET A JOB — probably at the remembered 17-year-olds, but also at the 23-year-old still crabbing about the same stuff. The singer dreams about a treehouse but winds up apparating under a couch; she zones out at work and pretends she’s in one of the few worse places on earth: a high school football game. The screaming is less righteous fury than a mask hitting the floor.
[5]
Tim de Reuse: A jangly uptempo pop-punk pastiche. Whatever. [4]. But I’ll add a point for the way that her voice cranes up and down and up and down when she holds out “Just like being seventeen agaaaaaaain” for like five seconds too long. And I’ll add a point for the weird, diagonal (Mitski-an?) all-major chord progressions that the verses wind through. And I’ll add a point for the energy of the mix — how wide and dynamic it is, every element percussive, nothing smeared with the chemical gloss of reverb and overcompression that afflicts the vast majority of contemporary pop-punk. And I’ll add a point for the unsettled pathos of “all the football boys I could’ve been,” and how it takes a tune that deals mostly in petty teenage details and spikes it with a syringe of existential identity-dread, recontextualizing the rest of the narrator’s desires into deeper frustrations: the closest that songwriting can get you to communicating the actual frustration of being between seventeen and twenty-three, where you slowly, slowly start gaining the vocabulary to describe what the fuck’s wrong with you. And I’ll add a point for the part about the attitude and catching a cold. That was funny.
[9]