Judging by the response on Twitter, the New England Patriots–L.A. Rams game earlier this month deserves to go down as the Worst Super Bowl Ever. But in between all the shit-posting about Tom Brady and Adam Levine’s tattoos, we were treated to perhaps the greatest post-game soundbite in NFL history. When asked about his team’s 13–3 loss to the Patriots, Rams offensive tackle Andrew Whitworth indulged in some unexpected locker-room existentialism: “I don’t give a crap if you have a Hall of Fame bust, if you’ve been a Pro Bowler, or win 20 Super Bowls. At the end of the day, you’re all gonna die.”
There’s something heartening in knowing that the despair we’re all feeling has trickled up to even handsomely paid athletes playing in the most popular sporting event in America. And while FEELS are the product of a very different LA, located far beyond the glare of stadium lights and militaristic spectacle of the NFL, they share a certain fatalist worldview with their hometown’s resident gridiron philosopher. On their second album, Post Earth, the band is consumed by the idea that our days here are numbered, and that the same assholes doing the lion’s share of destroying the planet are the only ones who’ll be able to afford to a rocket-ship escape from it. To FEELS, expressing deep concern for the state of the world means not giving a fuck about decorum and civility.
On their 2016 self-titled debut, FEELS didn’t sound like a band overly fixated with the fate of civilization, with producer Ty Segall wrapping their tunefully tattered garage-psych in cotton-candy fuzz and wiggy reverb. But over the past three years, it sometimes seems as if we’ve all aged about three decades, and the FEELS we hear on Post Earth sound more musically focused and emotionally unsettled, with producer Tim Green (ex-Nation of Ulysses) helping sculpt the playfully shaggy sound of their debut into taut post-punk precision. Segall’s mischievous spirit lingers in the opening dirty boogie of “Car” (right down to Laena Geronimo’s leering, Emotional Mugger-esque invitations to “come with me to candyland”), but it kicks open the garage doors to eulogize “the land of the free/One nation under fraud.”
The record is occasionally haunted by the specter of another of Green’s past production clients, Sleater-Kinney, whose prickly propulsion, do-or-die intensity, and chant-and-response interplay course through the album’s rabble-rousing mission statement “Find a Way.” But the most important lesson FEELS have heeded from their Olympia forbears is that polemical discourse and rock’n’roll fun are not mutually exclusive—and, if anything, they should encourage one another. “Sour” unleashes an acidic attack on VIP rooms and the self-absorbed posers who inhabit them, but it invites you to shimmy to an extended B-52’s-style rave-up before crashing the party. The title track eats the rich with even more animalistic bloodlust, its fusion of grunge sludge and beaming harmonies harking back to that brief moment when Veruca Salt teamed up with Steve Albini. And while “Awful Need” and “W.F.L.” (not a Happy Mondays cover) examine our omnipresent insecurities, Geronimo and fellow singer/guitarist Shannon Lay deliver their diagnoses with sun-smeared psychedelic melodies that suggest Magical Mystery Tour by way of Kill Rock Stars.
But if Post Earth is built from familiar reference points, it reassembles them in novel ways. The album’s brisk, 35-minute momentum is further accelerated by shapeshifting songs rigged with trap doors that lead to unlikely destinations, like the hardcore blitzkrieg that upends the slowcore lurch of “Tollbooth,” or the ominous, Sonic Youth-like breakdown that brings the simmering tension of “Find a Way” to a boil. Even an 82-second circle-pit stomper like “Deconstructed” is emblematic of Post Earth’s more considered approach: Lay and Geronimo’s overlapping rapid-fire rants twist like the strands of a double helix before their voices come together to announce their temporary cure for unrelenting frustration and anxiety: “Just give me a cigarette/Just give me a fucking cigarette!” Post Earth may not allay your fears of our impending apocalypse, but at least the advice is sound: Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
