Guppy (makes 1 album)

Ingredients:

• 1 part Weezer
• 1 part Charlotte Hatherly
• Veruca Salt
• Artisanal Kay Hanley

In a shaker, combine Weezer and Charlotte Hatherly over a handful of cool as ice, shake gently. Rim a high-ball generously with Veruca Salt, pour the shaker contents through a strainer. Add two liberal splashes of Kay Hanley before garnishing with a Cherry Bomb. Serve thrown directly in the face.

Pardon my language, but:

This. Fucking. Album.

Charly Bliss is absolutely killing it. They’ve recaptured a kind of earnest, crunchy power pop/punk that I haven’t had a craving for in years. In a post-Blue Album time-frame, there are certainly plenty of bands that aimed to do this, but you can count on one hand the few that even knocked on the door. Charly Bliss kicked it in. They live here now.

As proscribed by the rock gods and set down in the before-times, Charly Bliss is correctly a four-piece outfit: sibling duo Eva and Sam Hendricks on guitar and drums respectively, Spencer Fox on second guitar and Dan Shure on the bass. Eva pulls lead vocal duties combining an intrinsic hard-candy sugar with the sharp glint of a razor. Applied to her borderline-oversharing lyrics and the occasional scream/squeal for punctuation, the result is infectious in the very best way. As a musical entity, it’s difficult to explain how they walk this tightrope hanging over a bottomless chasm of “merely nostalgia” without a single misstep, but you can hear it for yourself. Their sound isn’t replicating something specific, they’ve absorbed a fundamental quality that makes it genuine. It feels contemporary to Weezer but it doesn’t feel like they’re playing Weezer songs. It feels adjacent to Letters to Cleo but they’re not Cleo songs.

Basically it’s a miracle. This is a miracle album. Quality is bursting from every seam. A veritable cornucopia of brilliance. I’m out of words. The ones I used don’t really feel entirely adequate. Black Hole is amazing. Ruby is amazing. Look, they’re all amazing, I’m serious. Do the needful. I even added a Bandcamp link so you can give your sweet sweet dollars slightly more directly to the band.

I can only do so much for you, it’s your time now.

Go.