You Are Who You Hang Out With

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The Front Bottoms’ eighth album opens with a sound that will feel instantly reassuring to anyone who’s followed the New Jersey group since their early-2010s breakthrough. Leadoff track “Emotional” begins with a corrosive acoustic riff that perfectly encapsulates this band’s perennial balancing act between folk-song simplicity and punk-rock grit. But when singer/guitarist Brian Sella starts wordlessly wailing a few seconds in, that sense of comfort is instantly shattered—because his familiar voice is slathered in Auto-Tune. “It felt pretty punk rock to do it,” Sella tells Apple Music. “I’m always experimenting with new sound, and I feel like it hits pretty hard when you hear it.” As Sella further explain, the Auto-Tune effect was less the product of some master plan than a weird demo experiment he decided to keep for the finished result. “That’s something we tried to lean into this album, with particular techniques: If it feels right, let’s just do it.” But as “Emotional” builds itself into a shout-it-out, festival-sized anthem, Sella’s software trickery comes to epitomize the internal tension at the core of <i>You Are Who You Hang Out With</i>: the instinct to do what comes naturally versus the desire to blaze a new path forward. .

via Apple Music

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