Jonny - The Drums: Review
The Drums
are the musical project of California singer and songwriter Jonny Pierce. Following their first three albums as a full band the following three have been a solo project for Pierce. The shift also saw their transition away from surf rock stylings into an equally sunny indie pop style.
Review by Lav:
Jonny had album-of-the-year potential for me. If you're only a casual observer of the band that may seem surprising as they aren't exactly the type of high-brow critical bait I tend to fall for sometimes. But I became a big fan of the band during the rollout for their 2017 album Abysmal Thoughts. I became a flat out super fan just a few years later when Jonny shared Brutalism a terminally underrated album that turned up in the top 10 of my albums of the year list in 2019. If anything, I like the album even more now than I did at the time. When combined with the parade of absolutely excellent singles the band released in the lead-up to the album I was extremely excited. While Jonny may not be the flat-out best album I've heard anywhere this year, it's a project that was WELL worth the wait.
I'm gonna tackle this record in pieces because it's easy to divide up. The album certainly reaches a more conceptual and thoughtful point, but it starts off with some straight-up blissful indie pop. I Want It All and Isolette are two singles I love to lead off the album. Want It All has some of the most infectious repetition I've ever heard on its chorus and the rushes from its most quiet points into its densest are brilliant. The fluttering guitars and punchy drums of Isolette are only outdone by the irresistible refrains throughout.
Two more highlights follow next. Better is built around this wonderful double-edged sword of Jonny missing someone but admitting that the isolation they left behind loves him more than the person ever did. It's kind of wordy and conceptual when I say it out like that but the song is so blissful and instantaneous that you would never know. I'm Still Scared is a shorter track with this stiffer uptempo drum machine underneath everything. It's grown on me since I first heard it even if it doesn't have the same impact and the record's sunniest points.
From this point on we hit the middle portion of the record which changes in a few ways. Firstly, it becomes a lot more conceptual and it does this with shorter interlude-type tracks. Those songs dig into the themes of the record like Jonny's own loneliness and the attempts he makes to speak to his younger self. Surrounded by three shorter tracks, we get the single Plastic Envelope. The song has an incredible chorus that's drilled its way deeper and deeper into my hear every time I hear it. The writing is incredible but on top of it the magnetic and versatile vocal performance is perfect. It manages to convey the more serious emotions that heighten Jonny's message to his younger self in the surrounding interludes.
Also in the middle of the record, we get Dying a collaboration with Rico Nasty. Somehow, despite how strange of a combination Rico and The Drums are together I think it works really well. She brings a heartfelt and down-to-earth performance and the little instrumental flourishes surrounding her verse add a lot. Despite the loneliness the song dabbles in I can't help but find it utterly adorable. That transitions into Green Grass which is a gentler, slower song with the guitars made a bit more prominent and the vocals layers on the hook adding a lot. The expanding instrumentation across the finale minute also leads the song to a great outro.
The one song I'm not crazy about in this incredible run spanning most of the album is Be Gentle. It's the first REALY slow song on the album and while I appreciate the sentiment and the way it connects to the surrounding tracks I'm just not big of a fan. There are moments on it I enjoy like the rising moments at the end of each line on the pre-chorus but the songwriting doesn't translate well into such a sparse and slow format.
Thankfully, when Jonny does return to the more sunny-sounding indie pop he does so with two of my favorite songs of 2023. Obvious and The Flowers are two of the best singles I've heard all year. It's almost astonishing to me how you can pen simple indie pop that is THIS instantaneous and THIS catchy. The sound of both songs is just perfectly calculated bliss and their high points are some of the most awe-inspiring I've heard all year. The tracks may seem relatively simple but what they achieve is astounding.
If this record has an Achilles heel, it's the closing run. Teach My Body gets off to a slow start and even though it does eventually hit its stride and reach a bridge and final chorus I like a lot I can't say it lives up to the record's best tracks. That's followed by Pool God the absolute strangest diatribe on the album with this strange synth loop making up the core of the instrumental. My main problem with the track is that it's underwritten and features a lot of extremely unnecessary repetition that just fills the song out. I think if you were going to make something that sounds SO different from the rest of the record you would need to make sure it was really good and this just isn't.
I don't think Jonny will surprise many people. If you're familiar with The Drums the only big changes on this record will be the length, rounding out at over 50 minutes, and the heavier focus on conceptuality heightened by many of the shorter tracks. But at no point does this album feel routine or predictable in a taxing way. That's because nearly every moment is kept impeccably refreshing with more catchy refrains than I can even count and one piece of sun-kissed musical bliss after another throughout. Somewhere along the way Jonny Pierce realized he has a superpower that allows him to craft sunny, shimmering indie pop and on the album he lends his namesake to he delivers on it time and time again to spectacular results. 8.5/10
For more great indie check out my review of Sufjan Stevens' Javelin
