Only two years elapsed between the Men’s 2014 album, Tomorrow’s Hits, and its follow-up, Devil Music, but it felt like 10. Up to that point, the Brooklyn band had maintained a furious rate of both output and evolution. The five-album stretch from 2010’s Immaculada to Tomorrow’s Hits is right up there with Sonic Youth’s 1980s run in terms of capturing a primordial punk band’s incremental transformation into an artful, melodically sophisticated rock juggernaut. With each new record, the Men revealed surprising new strengths—krautrock rave-ups, gut-punching power-pop, countrified balladry—that formed the foundation for the next one. But while that winning streak was certainly an exciting thing for fans to behold at the time, the relentless touring that resulted ultimately sapped the Men of their spark.
After finishing up their Tomorrow’s Hits duties, the band didn’t just hit the pause button, they did a full-on reboot. When they resurfaced with Devil Music, they had both shed a crucial member (bassist/producer Ben Greenberg) and abandoned their carefully cultivated sense of ambition. Recorded over a weekend and self-released on the band’s own label, the caustic, caterwauling Devil Music reveled in lo-fi scuzz as if the previous half decade never happened. The Men had regressed back into the band they once were, but, given all they had accomplished in the interim, that made them nearly unrecognizable.
As singer/guitarist Mark Perro would explain, Devil Music was less a calculated back-to-the-garage move than a violent reaction to the band’s creative stagnation. In a 2016 blog interview, he revealed Tomorrow’s Hits was actually already in the can as far back as 2012, but the business of keeping the show on the road prevented this once-restless band from writing new material for a good three years. “Anything I had to say on [Devil Music] was very selfish and pretty frustrated,” he said, “but it goes to show you that music is a beautiful thing, because now that I got some of those songs out, I feel much better.” And so on Drift, the Men frolic in the greener grass that lies on the other side.
While the new album marks the band’s return to the Sacred Bones roster after their DIY Devil Music release, it betrays no desire to live up to or build upon the legacy they once established on that label. (Likewise, their pared-down touring itinerary suggests a reluctance to revert to their old road-warrior ways.) Drift is the sound of a de-stressed band following its wandering muse wherever it leads, with seemingly little concern for how the end results fit together. As such, it is at once their most eclectic record and their most erratic.
Of course, the Men’s earlier albums weren’t lacking for variety, but each of them sounded like the same band trying new things, with a natural ebb and flow to their stylistic mutations. (For instance, on 2012’s Open Your Heart, the ragged country-rock of “Candy” felt like a well-earned comedown after the fuzz-blasted emotional bloodletting of “Please Don’t Go Away” and the title track.) But on Drift, the Men just sound like a bunch of different, unrelated bands. And where they’ve always thrived on the tension between their in-the-red overdrive and their rough ’n’ tumble tunefulness, on Drift, their aggressive and accessible qualities are sharply segregated.
So on the one hand, you have undercooked oddities like the goth-night stomper “Maybe I’m Crazy,” a bubbling cauldron of pulsating synths and no-wave sax squawks that seems to be building toward a violent release that never comes, or the steady motorik cruiser “Secret Light,” which sounds exactly like Damo Suzuki improvising over “L.A. Woman.” And then you have the middle-aged Meat Puppets saunter of “Rose on Top of the World” and the Harvest Moon-glowed “So High,” both gentle mid-tempo folk-rock tunes that, even in light of the Men’s previous rootsy detours, are disarmingly refined and relaxed. They’re pretty songs, but a bit too breezy to do the heavy lifting on an album where the band’s exploratory impulses take precedence over their songcraft.
In that sense, Drift feels a lot closer in spirit to Perro and bandmate Nick Chiericozzi’s Dream Police project, where they workshopped an array of ideas outside the Men’s noise/pop sweet spot (though Drift does throw the circle pit a bone with the rote punk rager “Killed Someone”). In its quieter moments, Drift reveals some uncharted territory for this band to annex: The Six Organs of Admittance-worthy interstitial “Sleep” may clock in at under three minutes, and the lyrics may only amount to repeated incantations of its title, but its mounting maelstrom of acoustic oscillations and trembling strings is transfixing. The hypnotic closing hymn “Come to Me” further reinforces the notion that this band probably has a quality neo-folk record in them.
In their initial run, the Men powered through every style in the classic-rock and punk playbooks and mastered them in five years flat. After Devil Music showed they can always go back to bruising basics when the mood strikes, Drift is the sound of them trying to figure out what to do next—and compared to the maniacal focus and intensity of previous records, the band can sound oddly rudderless here. But they can still stun you with a radical reinvention. In this case, it’s “When I Held You in My Arms,” a Wurlitzer-smoothed, dark-night-of-the-soul ballad that’d be right at home in the most sorrowful depths of Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call. The song reveals a willingness to expand not just their musical vocabulary, but their emotional one as well. This band has opened its heart in the past, but never before have the Men presented such a vivid, despairing portrait of a broken one.
