I’m writing this on Monday, November 2nd, and scheduling it to be published on Wednesday, November 4th. I have no idea what the world I’m sending this newsletter into is going to look like. I hope you’re all staying safe, taking care of yourself, and looking out for each other.
When I used to be in a band, our guitarist would troll Twitter on our band account, following as many people as Twitter would allow him to every day, and eventually unfollowing anyone who didn’t follow us back the next day. It actually worked quite well at raising our number of “followers,” but how many of them actually paid any attention to anything we posted? I’m guessing not many.
I think my friend was slightly ahead of the curve at the time, but now this is a common strategy, and I’ve been on the receiving end countless times. Remembering what it was like to be in a new band trying to grow a following, I tend to check out most of these bands that follow me on Twitter or Instagram, but rarely do I find something that really captures my attention or leads to me following back.
The one exception to this? Magazine Beach.
Magazine Beach was my happiest musical discovery of 2019 — a scrappy little pop-punk band out of Washington DC who followed me on Instagram and earned a follow back with a brief snippet of an in-progress song that got stuck in my brain for the rest of the day. Their debut EP, Sick Day, ended up becoming one of my favorite releases of 2019 (I should have ranked it higher, tbh), and has remained in my musical rotation ever since. In fact, it’s become the album I put on almost every time I take a shower as a kind of timer — it’s ten minutes long, so I know I need to be done before the final song ends, lest I lose all track of time and run out of hot water (yet again).
Okay, maybe that’s too much information, but what it boils down to is that I think Magazine Beach absolutely rule, and I’m psyched to report that their newest EP Friendless Summer, released this past Friday, is just as awesome, a worthy follow-up that captures everything I loved about Sick Day while also expanding into exciting new musical and thematic territory.
I would describe Sick Day pretty solidly as a pop-punk record, but Magazine Beach’s Bandcamp page currently describes the band as “emo surfcore,” and it’s an interesting distinction. The “surfcore” label feels a little tongue-in-cheek to me, a nod to the “beach” in the band’s name, their constant references to the ocean, and the obvious influence they’ve taken from The Beach Boys, but breaking down the idea of “emo” is one of my areas of expertise, and it’s a label that fits Friendless Summer in a way it didn’t Sick Day. The latter is a record full of fast guitar and quirky, sarcastic lyrics — it’s perfect pop-punk, but pop-punk nonetheless. Friendless Summer still has fast guitar and sarcastic lyrics, and even throws in a heaping helping of gang vocals, but it also doubles down on melody and, lyrically, embraces raw, earnest emotion in a way its predecessor didn’t, and more than anything, it’s earnestness that defines emo for me.
The biggest change on Friendless Summer is the new fifth member of Magazine Beach, vocalist Casey Rutter. Harmonies have always been one of the best parts of Magazine Beach, but in the past they were relegated to the background, a bit of doo-wop whistling behind lead singer’s Angelo Leitner-Wise’s vocals. Friendless Summer, though, finds Rutter harmonizing with maybe 75% of Leitner-Wise’s vocals, and her voice adds a mesmerizing new element to the songs, sometimes reinforcing his words while other times creating almost hypnotic contrasting vocal lines and melodies. “How Many Bees? (3 Pounds)” could be a lost Tiger’s Jaw track, its upbeat guitar contrasting with a more melancholy background melody, Meitner-Wise and Rutter’s vocals singing the same words but at different octaves, with different inflections. It sounds amazing.
(“Twilight Baseball Scene,” meanwhile, it the EP’s fastest, most raucous track, but also has its most depressing and bleak lyrics, which is peak emo. It’s also named after one of cinema’s most brilliantly dumb moments, which is always a plus.)
Friendless Summer’s crowning achievement, though, is its final (and title) track.
Though the EP never explicitly references Covid or the pandemic, the title “Friendless Summer” is nonetheless evocative of the bizarre distance and loneliness inherent to existence in 2020, and this song channels that specific kind of depression you feel when the people you love feel so far away, maybe even lost forever. Sure, it contains some of the EP’s cleverest lyrics (“Oh my god, I wish my life was a movie/Over in a couple of hours” in verse one and “Oh my god, I wish my life were a movie/Quiet for a couple of hours” in verse two), but even those clever lyrics dive straight into the depression at the heart of this song with concerning, but refreshing, frankness.
The narrator’s façade crumbles as the song progresses, their laments growing more and more plaintive, but just as we’re really starting to worry about the narrator, represented by Meitner-Wise’s vocals, the song fades into an outro from Rutter, whose vocals provide an alternate perspective. “You’re the black in my coffee, you make me feel better/I swear I can feel you when I wear your sweater/You’re 575 just like beautiful weather/Please stay alive cause you make me feel better.” It’s a beacon of hope for the original narrator, a sign that they have something worth living for; it’s a testament to the power love and connection have to make our lives better and keep us going even when things are at their bleakest. It’s just what I needed after the rest of that song; it’s just what I needed after the year that has been 2020.
As much as I love Magazine Beach, I wasn’t expecting this from them, and I am beyond thrilled to be wrong about that. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this excited about a new band, or able to start following one so early in their career, and I can’t wait to see where they go next, because this growth feels exponential. Please check this EP out. It’s only fifteen minutes; you won't regret it.
ON A MORE CONCEPTUALLY WILD NOTE
I’m eager to share Magazine Beach because I think their work is genuinely awesome in every respect, but this next song, while a total bop, is one I’m mainly sharing because the concept is so surreal that I’m a bit astonished it exists at all: a sequel to 80s hit “Jessie’s Girl,” released in 2020 by prog-rock band Coheed and Cambria.
It does have Rick Springfield’s seal of approval, and it will absolutely be stuck in your head all day, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be happy about it or understand how exactly this came to be. To quote some of my friends about this song: “so incredibly confused and alarmed by the song’s existence,” “No! Is this real?”, “something gently befuddling to just kind of go ‘huh!’ at,” “This is so bizarre.” With reviews like that, how could you not check it out?
AND ONE LAST THING TO MAKE YOU RAISE YOUR EYEBROW AND TAP YOUR FEET
Over on YouTube, musician Alex Melton has a channel devoted to putting new, unexpected spins on well-known songs. His pop-punk covers of pop songs (such as Taylor Swift) are well done even if the concept isn’t exactly original, but what really made my jaw drop were his country covers of punk songs. Behold: Lit’s “My Own Worst Enemy” as a country song. “I Miss Y’all,” the country cover of blink-182’s “I Miss You.” And, most importantly, the country-western take on Panic! At the Disco, “I Write Sins, Not Tractors.”
I’m not sure what’s more wild to me: that somebody had this idea, or that the final results somehow slap.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!