The Brooklyn quartet Aye Nako's The Blackest Eye is an immense stylistic step forward for a band whose previous full-length effort, while addressing complicated personal experiences with sexual and racial identity, seemed like it was constrained in places by pop punk subgenre boundaries. Pop punk is not a subgenre known for its attention to nuance.
Their newest EP, The Blackest Eye, the title and lyrical themes of which riff on Toni Morrison's 1970 debut novel The Bluest Eye, breaks out of those subgenre forms. On it, Aye Nako are exploring, stretching, and pushing their sound into a unique place. Opening track "Leaving the Body" is a relentlessly catchy but also deeply affecting personal account of living with the cycle of sexual trauma in many of its complex realities: the reiteration of patterns of abuse ("Dead men don't abuse/ Still you resurrect") cemented by the common reaction of disbelief when one tries to tell one's story ("Who would believe me anyway/ It's just the kind of lie a girl would say"). "Killswitch" and "White Noise" examine racial fetishization and the immediate heaviness of a society that prizes whiteness at all costs.
Closer "Sick Fuck" addresses the weariness and predictability of dealing with a society that would rather turn away from you or place you into a box than acknowledge your queer humanity. "Already know what you'd say," main vocalist Mars Ganito and new guitarist Jade Payne sing together on the chorus, which breaks down into a bridge: "In lust we trust." To follow a path away from heteronormativity, away from society's maps, is exhausting, but it is also necessary for so many to live in truth. Is it more exhausting to lie to yourself or to deal with others' approbation, the song asks.
The guitar lines*,* vocal interplay, lyrical poignancy and pointedness, and song structures on The Blackest Eye avoid predictability and heavy-handed formulae; there are plenty of stylistic curveballs. Though there's a lot of music out there that references the '90s by people who experienced their early childhood during that decade, little of it is as playful or as interesting; where others fall into the trap of directly replicating a sound, Aye Nako take scraps of sonic references to any number of early Sub Pop/K/Yoyo artists and manipulate and repurpose them to their own effect.
One gets the sense that Aye Nako are this tightly coiled and elegantly structured because of the urgency of what they have to say; they can't afford to be anything less than precise. This is a band that is "political" because the circumstances of their own lives necessitate it, and we are all lucky to be able to hear their voices.
