Across its many iterations, punk maintains a steadfast tradition of running: away from suffocating hometowns, toward unknown horizons, into reckless relationships, out of trainwreck breakups. The galloping tempos reinforce the hasty decisions, and often it doesn’t matter where a song is going so long as it’s going there fast. On their debut LP All Belief Is Paradise, Brooklyn pop-punk band Fits embrace a frantic songwriting ethos in line with Plan-it-X’s early 2000s roster (think Spoonboy with extra amps and a drum kit) or fellow New York quartet LVL UP’s early records. Of the album’s 12 songs, none breaks the three-minute mark, and many clock in right around a minute. But this is no pool they’re building; if Fits shake their hooks out at a freewheeling churn, it’s only because every line has to be sung right this second or never.
Fits began as a songwriting exercise by de facto bandleader Nicholas Cummins, who scratched out bass and vocal demos into their phone before linking up with members of Big Ups and gobbinjr to flesh out the songs as a full rock band. Cummins tends to bury their heavy lyrical themes underneath bursts of righteous anger. There aren’t really happy songs on All Belief Is Paradise, but there are plenty of sharp turns and playful, surprising gestures. From the nose-diving guitar riffs on “Admission Day” to the spritzes of auxiliary percussion scattered throughout the album, Fits never let their feet drag.
Cummins edges their often double-tracked vocals with a compelling smirk, and the hyperbolic, inventive vernacular they employ in their lyrics adds to the sense of desperation propelling each song forward. “What we had was dead/But now it’s super dead,” they sing on “Superdead,” lamenting the end of a relationship that somehow broke even more after it had already broken up. At the end of “All the Time,” Cummins transforms a whole season into a verb: “I want you to be gone so I can summertime.” They drag an extra syllable out of that last word, folding a whine into the demand right before asking for its opposite. “I want you all the time,” Cummins concludes, sparking up both contradictory desires with equal fervor.
A lot of desires crop up on All Belief Is Paradise, and they often seem to be pulling Cummins in opposite directions at once. On “Running Out,” they take off toward the horizon with an eye cast over their shoulder, yearning for the past and future in the same breath while a clamor of tambourines and power chords spurs them on. “The Ground,” meanwhile, adopts a comparatively leisurely tempo while Cummins muses on an “old town” they’ve visited in the past. They repeat the phrase “you went away” on loop in the background, as if haunted by the decision to leave a place that will never really leave them. The running away and the not wanting to have run away compete for space here, stranding Cummins in the tortured middle ground between them.
More than desire and more than hurt, a fierce will to survive animates these lean, scrappy songs. Cummins’ lyrics can often be tricky to make out amid all the cymbals and distortion, but in the tone of their voice, they insist on being heard. The partially redacted narrative tends to draw you in deeper than wordy storytelling might. Instead of laying it all out, Cummins leaves it up to you to fill in the gaps between their oblique words, which makes Fits’ songs more spacious and flexible. There’s plenty to latch onto, and plenty to keep you on your toes.
