Cashier have a bit of a self-deprecating streak. The Louisiana quartet shrug off trendy genre signifiers in interviews, preferring just to describe themselves as “alt-rock.” When tasked with summing up “Like I Do,” the first single from their debut EP, The Weight, they called it a “simple” offering of “generic rock.”
Meanwhile, over the course of the handful of singles they’ve released since 2023, they’ve developed a reputation as your favorite band’s favorite band, opening for Dinosaur Jr., Whirr, and Nothing, among other titans of bleary-eyed, disaffected music. Frank Ocean—who always has his ear to the ground for homespun indie rock—is a fan. They recently signed to Julia’s War, the label run by They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s Doug Dulgarian, which has become one of the most reliable curators of grimy guitar music over the past few years. It’s clear Cashier are underselling themselves a little.
In some ways, The Weight is a humble debut. It’s six songs of riffs that roil at the edge of feedback, wrapped around sweetly sung lyrics about dissolving relationships and coming-of-age moments. You can see how the band might be tempted to describe its music as a nostalgic, meat-and-potatoes take on a couple of decades of off-kilter rock music. It’s easy enough to squint and hear bits of Hüsker Dü’s freewheeling noise pop, Meat Puppets’ eardrum-destroying take on Americana, or Unwound’s anxiety-addled post-punk. But what makes The Weight so compelling is a sense of real danger and unpredictability that clouds these familiar sounds. Opener “A Curse I Know So Well,” for example, begins with a guitar line that recalls the shredded early days of emo, before descending into something uglier. Each rhythmic stop-and-start, each peel of feedback is imbued with the sense that the band might fully crumble into noise and dissonance. Somehow, it never does.
The approach suits the perspective bandleader Kylie Gaspard expresses across the EP, of someone lost in their head and trying to make sense of the world around them. The lyrics are often cryptic and clipped, but bear evidence of turbulence and tumult. This comes through mostly clearly on “Same Old Mistakes,” a desperate ballad that recalls Hum’s bludgeoning inversions of shoegaze. She sings, as the title implies, of the pain of wasting time bashing your head against the same blunders as always. It’s self-lacerating, mantra-esque, and intense—and then it all dissolves into a squall of static. It feels like settling into an anxious sleep after a long night spent letting your thoughts race.
Cashier have spoken of a spiritual dimension to their music. Gaspard grew up as an evangelical Christian and studied theology. The lyrics of their earlier tracks are dotted with images of angels and other elements of the divine. But The Weight finds the band in a different place, almost consciously rejecting these skyward concerns—ugliness and anxiety lurk at the edge of every riff. Every moment of euphoria is obfuscated by distortion, every pop impulse is undercut by squealing dissonance. If they come across as pessimists, perhaps that’s why. This is music that’s grounded in the muck and the mire of mundane existence; escape is always just out of reach.
