Without a doubt, one of the great tragedies for indie-kids of the last decade was seeing how The Drums It crumbled without warning until it became a very shallow shadow, far removed from what the band had been throughout their first two glorious albums.
An aimless wander, with Jonny Pierce now the only member of the project and a string of albums that felt incomplete, uninteresting, thick and disconnected from what had long ago been their target audience. However, it seems that a reasonable amount of time has had to pass for the master of indie melodrama par excellence to have ended up finding the best way to combine accessibility, emotion and magic in his work, without giving up that already characteristic dose of purgative catharsis that grabs us by the neck and doesn’t let go.
Pierce is a tortured soul, self-aware of the roots of his traumas and with a chilling and unsweetened past that for some time now has become the leitmotif of his artistic discourse. Therefore we should not be surprised that those years of fast and hedonistic surf-pop tracks have already passed into history, in favor of a rawer proposal that has required rest and analysis.
Showing on the cover the naked, black and white body of his executioner, “Jonny” (Anti, 23) is the real-time breaking latest news of a healing process marked by the lucidity of having verified, in his forties, the present consequences of an unresolved past. Unafraid of what he may encounter along the way, Pierce descends into the hells of his psyche to retroactively pat his different selves on the shoulder and provide the appropriate words that past versions of him would have needed to hear. at the time (“You make me laugh like no one else / and you built a life where there was no life”, apunta en una naíf “Little Jonny”).
His odyssey through the recesses of memory will lead him to face, with courage and will, certain narrow passages of his life, now converted into devilishly catchy tracks with which he can heal with an easy chorus and radiant rhythm (“Islets”). A gift, that of sowing light among so much darkness, only available to those who have worked thoroughly on their self-care and have managed to draw a visible and deliberate line between their experiences in a remote yesterday (“She didn’t teach me love / she didn’t teach me trust”says in “Harms”) and your current contact with the world (“You say I’m too sensitive / now darlin you’re misreading things / I just finally give a shit about my own heart”cries in “Better”).
Throughout his fifteen fleeting cuts, Pierce also wants to give us what many of his historical followers have come looking for (that is, that portion of reverberated plucks so typical, conveniently balanced thanks to songs like “I Want It All”, “Plastic Envelopes” o “Teach My Body”); But far from settling for already exploited formulas, the New Yorker’s ambition also pushes him to want to explore the most experimental possibilities of his imprint, with passages close to electronic post-punk (“I’m Still Scared”) or directly creating messages of hope among heavenly rhythms where elaborate metaphors are not required to express your deepest feelings (“I used to want to die, but now I don’t want to die”, sings at the closing of the album). A final climax, intimate and overwhelming, that invites us to embrace vulnerability without regrets while we officially celebrate the return of the best version of The Drums.