Track 25: Reappearing Rat - Sunset Rubdown

You thought you were using this crisis as a kind of crowbar...

Spencer Krug is one of my favorite songwriters. There’s just something about his songs that 100% vibe with me, including a fairly simple one he released in 2022 that helped me get over my soul crushing fear of climate change. I also think an hourglass is different than quicksand. I too think it’s cool.

When Sunset Rubdown announced a new album this year, I was psyched. I am a weirdo who probably preffered those albums to peak Wolf Parade. Don’t get me wrong - the first Wolf Parade album is an absolute masterpiece, and when Krug and Dan Boeckner are both firing on all cylinders, it’s magistic. The problem is they rarely seemed to be beyond Apologies to Queen Mary, devoting a lot of their attention to various side projects.

Sunset Rubdown allowed Krug to embrace his full-weirdo persona, taking his band into allegorical fairy tales about children burning their eyes in fire, and poet meets prog concept albums with a slight ren-faire flare.

So maybe their first album is several years (Always Happy to Explode) isn’t as weird as I’d like it to be, but also maybe I need to give it more time. Either way, lead single is peak-Krug, writing about a rat that always shows up to remind you how angry you are, how bad things, get, how far from perfect it all is.

The best part is how good the band sounds, like they haven’t missed a beat, and it sounds damn near poppy for them, although Krug’s baked Bowie vocals will never let them hit like that, I’m sure. Still, there’s something really universal about the way Krug sings “You thought your fist making days were over!” Not yet, my friends. Probably not ever. There’s a lot of rats out there. And rats are incredibly intelligent creatures, as it turns out.

Click here for the Infinite Mixtape on Spotify.
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