Love Parquet Courts but wish they'd chill out a bit? Cheekface are for you

While social commentary in music seems more prevalent and articulate than ever, it's also never been more deeply felt. If in 2018's most discussed song The 1975 would love it if we made it, LA trio Cheekface's response would be "Making it? Yeah, that's cool, I guess. I'm fine either way, whatever." That's not to say their debut album isn't on the right side of history; they just choose to weaponise their ambivalence. Or, as opener "Dry Heat/Nice Town" has it, "We don't have to march long: just until we're over injustice, patriarchy, and American imperialism!" Easy peasy.

Information on the trio is scant to say the least. Their stream of instant-classic singles appeared on Bandcamp last year with typically minimal fanfare, boasting absurdly of-the-moment titles like "I Only Say I'm Sorry When I'm Wrong Now" and "Sexy National Anthem". Recorded at Elliott Smith's studio, Therapy Island is sparsely but crisply produced, save for the occasional frazzled production trick or hip hop airhorn. If you love Parquet Courts or BODEGA but wish they would chill out a bit, Cheekface make the kind of nineties-hangover slacker rock where even the tambourine overdubs sound deadpan.

On Therapy Island, everything's on fire or in retrograde and, even when everyone isn't out on protest marches, you can look up in the sky to see "a formation of clouds that spells out 'Abolish ICE'". But when you're surrounded by that level of devastation on a neverending basis, what's wrong with cracking a few jokes while the world burns?

Frontman Greg Katz, the self-confessed "Michael Phelps of eating snacks", never lets his Steven Wright-like delivery get in the way of a good punchline. His voice rarely veers beyond deadpan, but when he wants to be his own target, he'll occasionally break into a chirpy sneer. "I'm going for my own jugular", Katz announces like a Gen-X gameshow host on the clattering "Subterranean Homesick Blues"-from-hell that is "Big Blank Distraction", before adding "Or the jugular of someone who looks a lot like meeeee."

With almost every line a t-shirt slogan in waiting, Therapy Island might be the most quotable album of 2019 - there's a reason Cheekface already has its own Twitter lyric bot. Still, between droll potshots at boomer culture and gentrification scattered amongst the sharper political observations, it can occasionally get a bit much. Tucked away near the end of the record, "Liar Island" offers up a spaghetti western thrill that's more Morricone than Malkmus, but when Katz tells the listener "Now I'm going to be a little condescending - that means I'm talking down to you", you can't help but think that for once, he's trying a little too hard.

Regardless, Cheekface are simultaneously a band twenty years out of time and painfully relevant to the here and now. How they evolve as the world gets inevitably worse remains to be seen, but until then, the fuzz-splattered guitars and begrudgingly rousing choruses of Therapy Island serve as a pretty pithy snapshot of how a lot of us secretly feel most of the time.