The Yips

About

Petey USA may have amassed millions of followers as a TikTok funnyman, but music has always been his most sincere passion, and with his third album, <i>The Yips</i>, he presents his most serious statement to date: an ambitious concept album about people who’ve lost all concept of their ambitions. “The yips” is sports-speak for freezing up in a clutch situation, but Petey isn’t so much singing about professional athletes in a slump as ordinary people struggling to make it through the day, envisioning each song as a discrete conversation between desperate people gathered around the tables in a fictitious dive bar called The Yips. With his teenage hero Chris Walla behind the boards, Petey’s Midwestern emo roots blossom into heart-tugging heartland-rock anthems (“Breathing the Same Air,” “Model Train Town”) and soul-baring synth-pop manifestos (“As Two People Drift Apart,” “The Milkman”) that blur the line between ecstasy and exorcism. But on the title track, he invites fellow members of the low-self-esteem club to dance their blues away in a flurry of cowbell-clanking, sax-squawking Talking Heads funk, while the climactic “God Is the Gray” is a triumphant surge of pop-punk poetry that suggests Springsteen crashing the second stage at Warped Tour.

via Apple Music

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