Smirk, the power-pop-meets-punk-rock brainchild of Portland musician Nick Vicario, has a knack for turning tropes inside out. On his latest effort, Speculative Fiction, he reinvents suburban anhedonia with an unexpectedly meticulous, pop-forward sensibility. With help from friends like Ceremony’s Ross Farrar, Advertisement’s Ryan Mangione-Smith, and members of the Hotline TNT crew (who play in Smirk’s live band), Vicario recasts an archetypal narrator—the disaffected high schooler—as a grown-up trying to veer out of the fast lane and back to the familiarity of their constricting youth. Smirk’s first official album since 2022, Speculative Fiction is one hell of a reintroduction.
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Low Cut Connie: Livin in the USA [Contender]
Low Cut Connie is “disgusted to see our country descend into an authoritarian hell, a moral vacuum, a place where art does not lead the cultural conversation,” he said in a statement announcing his new protest album, Livin in the USA. The Philadelphia rock’n’roller reckons with this desperate state of affairs in timeworn rock’n’roll fashion, with a parade of theatrical, bluesy anthems designed to challenge the nation’s decaying political institutions, if not its musical ones. “Rock’n’roll is a table flipping artform,” he added in the statement. “It’s time to flip the table again.”
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