These days, punk is defined by the bands more than the beholders. “For anyone else—go fuck yourself,” reads the liner notes of Spiritual Cramp’s new album, their official debut. “Fuck the police; fuck the government; fuck everything,” bandleader Michael Bingham said back in 2018. Their misanthropy isn’t posturing or insincere, but it is calculated. See the $70 Harrington jacket for sale on the band’s merch store. See, also, the songs on Spiritual Cramp, which wouldn’t perturb your mom if they rang over the TJ Maxx speaker system. Nor would they sound like a misplaced opening for, say, Wet Leg. Hell, a Wet Leg collab is within the realm of reality—tell me “Can I Borrow Your Lighter?” isn’t the day-jobber’s “Chaise Longue.”
Accordingly, Spiritual Cramp isn’t hard to follow. (If it were, that would be our problem, not theirs.) The San Francisco sextet jam its conceit down our throats; they blow its cigarette-smoking thesis into our faces via two-and-a-bit-minute, uptempo, old-school punk songs that draw on rocksteady and radio-friendly indie and, presumably, Christian Death, too (the band that gave them their name). The conceit is this: “There’s a war on the TV and a war in my head / Tons of people are dead.” With its syntax jumbled up, a version of this line appears on most songs—the somewhat trite and thus universal throughline.
The vista includes cops being shitty, broken glass and cities on fire. There’s fentanyl and cigarettes. Regret, desire, hopelessness. And there’s an indefatigable backbone of thick, fizzy guitars and perfectly EQ’d bass holding it all upright. Lyrically, it’s kind of like spamming the remote while simultaneously doomscrolling and wondering what you’re doing with your life—unarmed person killed by police—CLICK; Speaker of the House doesn’t believe in dinosaurs—SCROLL; riot—CLICK; protest—SCROLL; fire; brimstone; SCREAM. (“You are now watching Spiritual Cramp television,” a woman’s voice announces on the first song.) At some point, like on the track “Catch A Hot One,” it becomes too much to bear. Disillusion wins. “It’s all enough to make you wanna die,” Bingham groans.
Fear not, though, for Bingham doesn’t dwell in this cavity of despair. (With the album’s 26-minute runtime, there isn’t time to.) Contrasting this depression is a song like “Blowback,” the swaggering opener. Its assassination of bipartisanship is a refreshing counterpoint to the reach-across-the-aisle fantasy. “I wanna know whose side you’re on!” Bingham demands as a swarm of guitars cranked through British tube amps rally around him, abruptly cutting off the fleeting, dub-tinged preamble. The track confirms that the us-versus-them war will have a fucking badass soundtrack if not a happy ending—and that this is not the heart-on-sleeve sap-punk whose armchair we’ve happily slipped into in recent years. Wake up, it demands.
While lots of the album draws on this template—rambunctious soundbite political-ish punk—it isn’t one-note, especially not if you look past the more incendiary lyrics. Take the Jekyll and Hyde-ing of “Addict,” as it centers on a disarming confessional: Bingham realizing the drugs are winning—have already won, maybe—turning the camera from external to internal conflict. The key line is “I don’t have the fucking energy / I can’t tell if it’s you or if it’s me.” This is the closest we get to “Spiritual Cramp Television” rather than, you know, regular television. The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it song is positioned in last place, meaning the album leaves you to sit with its biggest question. (This is, after all, the first conflict that we—Bingham—actually have control over: how we treat ourselves.)
Elsewhere, there’s more surface-level stuff in the form of a de facto sequel to Weezer’s “Beverly Hills.” “Slick Rick” finds Bingham ostensibly singing as America—though via the eponymous eye-patch-wearing rap legend—reeling off hedonistic dreamworld desires: “I want the biggest house on the block with a yard / I wanna fly everywhere and put the miles on my credit card / Four story house and a king-sized bed / I wanna pure breed dog / I wanna live in debt.” Its messaging is direct, sure, yet I wonder whether this is guilty-pleasure journaling just masquerading as satire.
The track most antithetical to the band’s Doc Martens-and-neck tattoos aesthetic is “Herbert’s On Holiday.” It’s a detox from the constant onslaught of TV-packaged war and wanting. (The war in the head gets a ceasefire too.) Who Herbet is, I’m not sure, but you can read the title as a reference to the holiday the band takes from their usual stomping and raging. Instead, Bingham asks his person to “Put your hands in my Harrington jacket […] We can lay down by the pool.” He digs a little deeper, too, and just in time for the chorus, where he reaches an affecting, vulnerable place: “If I’m being honest / If I’m being true / I don’t know where I would be / If I never met you,” he sings, curling around each word like he’s hugging it. A guitar-pop backdrop littered with pretty 7th intervals recalls “Mr Brightside” or something from Is This It. This band could be huge if they wanted to.
On their journey up and down (and up again) this gamut of human emotion—from anger (“Blowback”) to confusion and disillusion (“Addict,” “Can I Borrow Your Lighter?”) to misery (“Catch A Hot One”) to love and gratitude (“Herbert”)—Spiritual Cramp sound exceptionally tight. This may be the best-sounding record I’ve heard this year. That’s thanks in part to co-producer Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, The Linda Lindas), who ensures that they still resemble the band that started firing gritty, dub-influenced EPs out of the Mission District around 2017 (all of which are collected on the 2018 compilation Television). This is a far more polished Spiritual Cramp, though—a Spiritual Cramp that can, is, infiltrating the indie rock establishment, that may just tear it down from the inside. Then again, we might get that Wet Leg collab. Whatever happens, I won’t be changing the channel.
Hayden Merrick is a music writer from Brighton, UK. He contributes to Bandcamp, FLOOD, Pitchfork, Loud and Quiet and others, and was previously associate music editor for the cultural criticism site PopMatters. Please talk to him about music and let him on your podcast: @HaydenMerrick96
