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For me, that’s what the charm of this band is. It’s really aggressive music, but it’s also very happy music. It’s cheerfully scummy, I guess.
Puja Patel: It does feel cheery.
EM: The other thing I love about this band is that rock’n’roll has this great, long, storied history of bands deciding, “Hey, we’re going to write our own theme song.” The Monkees have a theme song, Devo have a theme song, etc. And Chubby and the Gang, on this album, have two theme songs. There’s the first one called, “Chubby and The Gang Rule OK?” And the second one is called, “The Rise and Fall of the Gang.”
PP: They’ve already fallen? In their theme song?
EM: Well, honestly, the second song is a tragedy. Because the first song is basically saying, like, “We ain’t done, we’re on the run/Chaos is the reason that we’re having fun.” And then the second one, “The Rise and Fall,” is like what would really happen: where they’re like, we’re really hungry all the time, and that’s why we steal, and now we’re in jail. But we’ve got to keep doing it because we don’t have opportunity. So it’s like the grim reality of what it means to have to steal in order to eat. It’s very Les Misérables or something like that, but on this album of very fun punk songs.
PP: Madison, what is your version of Speed Kills?
Madison Bloom: Evan and I have both picked—not similar, they don’t sound the same—but we both chose records that are very fun and supplied a lot of joy for us. Mine is Jeff Rosenstock’s new record NO DREAM.
Jeff Rosenstock is someone that I was not always super into. I’m not a huge pop punk person. But something about this record completely caught my attention. It’s just super fun, very immediate, approachable. This is a very fast record, but it’s also incredibly melodic. So it’s not quite as heavy as a metal album.
But the thing that I find most enjoyable about Jeff Rosenstock’s music is that he’s a very earnest and sincere songwriter, but he’s not without humor. One of my favorite songs on the record is a track called “***BNB.” He’s really just singing about how someone is renting out their daughter’s apartment on Airbnb without telling their daughter, which is a very specific, strange thing to sing about, in my opinion. But it’s one of my favorite songs because he has these hilarious lines in it. One of my qualifications for what is good rock music at this level is like, are there lyrics that you’re just shouting along to and shaking your fists along with? This is for all you New Yorkers who probably know what this means, but he says, “Massage place in the building, we know what’s the fuckin’ deal.” And I shout it every time I hear it.
I think that one of the great things about heavier rock music is you’re not always going to it for some, like, deep introspective moment. It’s like sometimes you know, it’s just a massage place that’s a little sketchy and that’s all it is. I’m not writing volumes of notes about what that means—I know what it means.
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