The Breeders’ new album features their iconic Last Splash lineup. It is smoothly confident with many moments of bliss, even as the lyrics evoke isolation, frustration, and scuzz.
The “comeback album” can arrive with a suite of expectations attached many of which tend to boil down to one question: Will the artist revive their signature sound, the one most likely to trigger a dopamine rush of recaptured youth in the listener?
All Nerve, the new album from alt-pop icons the Breeders comes packaged with a particularly weighty version of that narrative. It’s the band’s fifth full-length and first since 2008’s Mountain Battles, but perhaps more importantly, it’s the first album in 25 years to feature—in addition to Kim Deal on vocals, guitar, and keyboards, and her sister Kelley on guitar—bassist Josephine Wiggs and drummer Jim MacPherson. This iteration was last found on Last Splash, the band’s 1993 album that reeled off one of the alt-pop era’s most deliriously off-kilter singles with the groovy, gummy “Cannonball” and contained a ton of other chestnuts—the gorgeous extinguished-soul ballad “Do You Love Me Now?,” the sweat-drenched summer ode “Saints,” the cheeky religion rebuke “Divine Hammer.” Last Splash was a hooky jab at the self-importance that sometimes threatened to overtake alt-rock in its earliest days, a middle finger caked in funnel-cake sugar.
It’s a lot to live up to, and many bands would crumble under the pressure—or at least try too hard to recapture past glories. But the Breeders avoid this trap: While its title is a double entendre that implies both courage and open-wound neuroses, All Nerve is smoothly confident. The four Breeders have individually and together slashed idiosyncratic paths through pop; on All Nerve, they collectively dig into that ideal, with each member playing to their strengths—the Deal sisters trading off harmonies and licks while Kim yelps abstract poetics, Wiggs holding down the low end so the sisters can leap ever higher, MacPherson keeping the beat urgent even when the BPM lets up a bit.
This approach results in many moments of bliss, even as the lyrics evoke isolation, frustration, and scuzz. The title track describes a longing that’s curdled from its own heat, with whispered-secret harmonies revealing the primal need only hinted at by Kim’s plaintive verses. The chorus’ happy-fun-ball explosion is the inevitable result of that paradoxical angst, with Deal’s “I won’t stop!” acting as the spark that lights her bandmates’ dynamite stick. The chugging centerpiece “Spacewoman” is starlit yet weary, its analog-synth flutters whooshing through Kim’s descriptions of spotlight-borne alienation (“When you look up/At your big light show/Do you ever wanna turn around and go/Hitting every green light on the long way home”) to create a waking-dream effect. And “MetaGoth” is a grand showcase for Wiggs’ ice-queen vocal—the music outlines a trip too close to the edge of the abyss before shards of feedback rise up to blot out the riffs.
Those looking for Last Splash Pt. 2 might be disappointed by All Nerve. It’s not as instantly grabbable as its quarter-century-old predecessor, both in terms of its alt-pop banger quotient and the moods it sustains. After “Spacewoman,” the album nearly falls into itself—the open-road murder ballad “Walking With a Killer” and the stagger-swaying “Howl at the Summit” are almost too vibe-oriented, making the implosive opening of “Archangel’s Thunderbird” all the more urgent. More often than not, All Nerve is a satisfying listen because it lets the Breeders dig into their reasons for being drawn back into each other’s orbit—including the left-of-center hooks, the withering poetics, and the shared prickliness toward meeting outside expectations.
