Viagra Boys are at their straightforward best on career-high viagr aboys

Your more hardcore compatriots are always demanding proof of noise credibility, the general public will flip up their nose whether your commentary is substantive or dribble, and music critics will swear up and down that you can have too much personality. Let your freak flags fly, you damn beautiful Swedes; your nearly self-titled new release is a singular moshing of your own creation. Don’t mind the posers.

Frontman Sebastian Murphy has been harnessing his chronically online absurdity to the point where one-liners and meme refrains are now a stream of consciousness. Viagr Aboys sees tirades dig their heels in and infest the tracklist; lyrics burst with meta-modernity, and are only tentatively aware of time signatures at large. You’ll hear about Chandler Bing dying in a hot-tubbing accident (likely a lampoon of fascism, somehow), and at some point you’ll be shedding silent tears at the necessity of love. Funny how that happens.

If you’ve clued into any number of previous Viagra Boys releases, the soundplay and idea craft here will be unsurprising, with barn-burning dance punk, grooves fit for the Richter scale, and a synth only when the synth-signal lights up the sky in their time of need. What is immediately, deliciously different here is the pacing. Listening to this record is equivalent to being on a moving sidewalk at the airport with a rocket-powered wheelchair; there are G-forces propelling this tracklist astronauts could not withstand. There are no mid-tempo, mid-tracklist experiments, as creativity is done on the fly, seemingly as the police are closing in.

The exception is the record’s miraculous piano ballad closer, both hilarious in the position that “a record should probably just end with one of those,” as well as so genuinely moving that it flips the record on its head. In the place of a punchline at the end of this setup is sobering reality, a half-worn, half-earned portrait of strange love.

Its delicacy is inverse to the rest of the record’s brashness, or maybe confidence. It takes a sweltering amount of either to pull out all the stops, except for just one, and they could only do it once. You can only tell a joke a single good time, and in their case, breaking the planes of absurdity is a one-way ticket before your audience checks out. Hiding in wait for that chance takes something no one would ever levy at Viagra Boys for having; it takes real discipline. Nothing more punk than that.