Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
Athletics – What Makes You Think This Is How It All Ends?
There were hints that something was afoot in the Athletics’ camp back in 2024. In January they rereleased their singles “When to Run” and “Where to Hide,” and then in May came their first new song since 2016. “VI” was described as a continuation of their 2011 opus Who You Are Is Not Enough, both sonically and thematically; it certainly sounded the part. Still, that was the end of it for almost a year, until they unveiled “Like Hell” in March. That song, like “VI,” would feature on their reunion album, What Makes You Think This Is How It All Ends?, to come out at the end of May.
With “VI” and “Like Hell” as the first two tracks, What Makes You Think This Is How It All Ends? is set up as a pretty straightforward continuation of Who You Are Is Not Enough, albeit somewhat compressed—it’s clear that “When to Run” and “Where to Hide” were nice exercises in brevity—but that impression is not strictly accurate.
The New Jersey quintet takes a number of detours on their new album; past releases had sprinklings of post-hardcore influence throughout, but the second half of What Makes You Think This Is How It All Ends? finds Athletics at their most aggressive yet. The screamed vocals work nicely as an accent on “You Are My Home,” but the band’s dip into heavier territory on the slowburning “Don’t Let Me Sink” and the more conventionally structured finale “Our Heads Are Bent” don’t fully mesh in the context of those songs. On the other hand, “Where I First Heard the Sound” strikes a perfect balance between the sweeping and atmospheric post-rock they built a name on and their newfound anthemic sensibilities. And when Athletics do return to that well, as on the midsection pairing of the seven-minute “Endless” and the five-minute “Gaps,” there are few who can match those heights.
Disappointing / Average / Good / Great / Phenomenal
The Young Hearts – The Good, the Bad, & the Rest of Us
We haven’t heard from The Gaslight Anthem since their 2023 comeback album, Spanish Love Songs is taking their sound in a softer and synthier direction, and the Menzingers’ recent material has leaned into country. The bands that carried the torch for punk that draws from heartland rock over the past two decades are moving on, and we need someone to fill that void. The best contenders, oddly enough, hail from the UK. Scotland’s Cold Years took the style to stratospheric heights on Goodbye to Misery, and they only sound bigger on the cleaner and more streamlined A Different Life. The Young Hearts, from Kent, are a bit scrappier, a bit rougher around the edges, but that only works to their advantage.
They’ve been releasing music since 2015, but it was only in the 2020s that they’ve really hit their stride, and last summer’s The Good, the Bad, & the Rest of Us is another winning entry into their catalog. These five songs clock in just a hair under twenty minutes, enough to dig their claws in but not so long they overstay their welcome—since their debut EP Everything We’ve Left Behind the average Young Hearts song has gotten quite a bit shorter, but they’ve been sure to make the most of every second.
“Hell or High Water,” released back in 2024, was the EP’s warning shot, and it’s easy to hear why; it’s a classic Young Hearts tune, a rousing singalong with a characteristic edge of defiance: “come hell or high water / I race towards the thunder,” booms the chorus. That momentum carries all throughout The Good, the Bad, & the Rest of Us, beginning with the rollicking title track, a fiery display of the band’s technical guitar chops. “Outlaws” boasts one of the best hooks in their whole catalog, even if its opening riff sounds more than just a bit like one of their inspirations. The closing “A Life on Fire” is really the only time The Young Hearts pump the brakes much, but it provides a nice change of pace, particularly with the tradeoff vocals in the second verse. Their punk icons might have left some big shoes to fill, but The Young Hearts put it best themselves, chanting out at the end of the EP: “I find my soul in these shoes.”
Disappointing / Average / Good / Great / Phenomenal
ness lake – normal speed
The earliest ness lake material is just about ten years old: varicose, spanning nearly 22 minutes, was released in mid-August of 2016. On Bandcamp, two sentence fragments, in all lowercase, give a hint as to the whole project’s genesis—the seven songs on varicose, “inspired by teen suicide, elvis depressedly, and flatsound,” just “don’t fit the genre of my other band.” Indeed, ness lake’s sound is worlds away from the basement-tested emo of Chandler Lach’s main project; at the time of varicose, ness lake was his solo project, a man in a bedroom, making intimate indie rock not far off from that of his lo-fi influences. By now, though, ness lake has moved well past them.
Normal Speed is not an album for bedrooms—ness lake, now a full band, seems to have their hearts set on stadiums. While these songs do retain the charming, less-than-polished feeling of Lach’s early work under that moniker, Normal Speed is bigger and more ambitious, although never so much that the lo-fi production underserves the songwriting. The opening “Fish Tank” marries the warmth of a home recording with the scale of a latter-day Bright Eyes LP, swelling in its final minute without sagging under its own weight; “You Get It All” retrofits a folk rock ballad with streaks of grungy guitar and one of Normal Speed’s best hooks. That same template forms the basis of “Deserving” and “Underneath,” which come back to back near the end of the album, but the former goes for the throat in a way that feels genuinely unexpected, and “Underneath”—with its booming drums and echoing, modulated vocals—sounds eerie and unhinged; by the second half of the track, it sounds like a long-lost tape beginning to decay.
“Champagne” and “Thrift Store Knife Set” offer ness lake the chance to play things straighter, the former a low-key alt-country rocker with a sneakily memorable chorus, and the latter song perfects the kind of scuzzy indie rock that Exploding in Sound was pumping out in the 2010s. “Semicircled,” appearing early in the Normal Speed tracklist, occupies a similar space to “Thrift Store Knife Set” but less successfully; Lach’s rawer vocal delivery clashes with the breeziness of the music behind him. It makes for an odd bridge between “Fish Tank” and “You Get It All,” and it’s one of the only times on Normal Speed that Lach departs from the raspy deadpan he employs throughout most of the album. That delivery could get tiresome for some listeners, depending on tastes, but it feels appropriate: he never sounds like he’s trying too hard. He just sounds like he happened to get it right the first time.
Disappointing / Average / Good / Great / Phenomenal
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Zac Djamoos | @gr8whitebison
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