Influences don’t matter here, so I won’t inform you that Japandroids play from a tradition of DIY punk or that they worship Guns N’ Roses. Yes, they’re a stripped-down drum and guitar two-piece, but the sound is bigger than “lo-fi.” They’re playfully aware of genre shtick and the chances that they’d be incorrectly labeled “proto”-something or other—instead, they’re delightfully “Post-Nothing.”
By avoiding the cumbersome classifications, they’re free to play heart-on-sleeve with no gimmicks. Few bands apart from the Wrens or Tough Alliance convincingly entertain the notion of such earnestness. The lyrics are snappy bursts of confessional teenage poetry elevated by bleeding guitars and cymbal washes and shouts of “yeah!” It’s a kind of youthful exuberance that could be tiring—but here, it sounds like lightning in a bottle, an energy that only a band with a truly synchronous connection could conjure.
Song titles like “The Boys Are Leaving Town,” “I Quit Girls” and “Young Hearts Spark Fire” reveal the content. The last is an instant classic, selling their punk ethos in an anthem anyone my age should find relatable: “We used to dream/Now we worry about dying.”
So should you find yourself pondering mortality and the esoteric time signatures of Dirty Projectors, here’s the antidote: find a friend and a jug of wine and blast “Crazy/Forever,” shouting “We’ll stick together forever/Stay sick together/Be crazy forever.” It’s this type of strangely idealistic comfort I look for in rock music that draws me into Post-Nothing again and again.
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