It’s been an excellent 12 months for the eternally beleaguered power-pop loyalist: Paul McCartney remains to be packing arenas around the globe, Sloan and Guided by Voices are nonetheless going sturdy, bands named after GBV songs are on the rise, and Cleaners From Venus’ Martin Newell is broing down with The Rock. However the nationwide breakout of Sharp Pins—a.okay.a. Chicago DIY-scene pillar Kai Slater, an artist younger sufficient to be Macca’s nice-grandson—supplies probably the most heartening indicator that the spirit of ’65 remains to be alive in 2025. As soon as a low-key vessel for the dainty tunes that didn’t go well with Slater’s noisy energy trio Lifeguard, Sharp Pins have been elevated to function attraction when his self-issued 2024 album, Radio DDR, obtained an expanded large launch this 12 months, adopted by a coronating tour with indie elders the Arduous Quartet.
Whereas Radio DDR’s endearing lo-fi singalongs offered Slater as a valedictorian from the Robert Pollard college of industrious Midwestern home-recording auteurs singing in fake British accents, the album shirked the rough-sketch aesthetics and subversive methods of old-school GBV data—these have been totally flowered songs nurtured in a terrarium of tape hiss. And but Radio DDR was greater than only a hit-after-hit procession of gleaming guitars and melt-in-your-mouth melodies—it was a portrait of a younger man with restricted means summoning all of the romance and chance that when sparked a youthquake 60 years in the past. Once you’re a part of a era whose adolescence was stolen by the pandemic and who appears consigned to a lifetime of debt and doomscrolling, singing foolish love songs begins to really feel like an act of defiance.
However simply because the world at massive was tuning in to Radio DDR (to not point out Lifeguard’s personal righteously rambunctious 2025 launch, Ripped & Torn), Slater was already prepping Balloon Balloon Balloon, which maintains the identical staggering hooks-per-second ratio as its predecessor, whereas permitting better house for his extra outré concepts to flourish. If Radio DDR had the constant movement of a greatest-hits assortment that would work simply as effectively on shuffle, Balloon Balloon Balloon is extra deliberate in design. Its 18 correct songs are evenly subdivided into three acts, every capped by a quick burst of sound-collage chaos that capabilities as the alternative of a palate cleanser, like a teaspoon of mud to chase beneficiant servings of honey.
