Over the past five years, the Front Bottoms have called the bluff of every guitar band that’s complained about how they need the right look, the right sound, the right press or the right connections to make it in the depressed market of 2010s indie rock. Early on, the New Jersey duo were typically described as folk-punk—even after they went electric on 2015’s Back on Top and subsequently crashed the Billboard top 50, “Late Night With David Letterman” and Coachella. But while artists in that eternally uncool genre often use strident politics to stake some claim to credibility, Front Bottoms were chatty and chummy instead, writing songs about swimming pools and drug addiction that brimmed with the beery bonhomie of a dorm-room bull session. Though their touring partners and point-and-shout-along shows suggest a tangential relationship with emo’s fourth wave, they’ve eluded any clear scene, releasing albums on both ’80s/’90s college-rock mainstay Bar/None and ’00s pop-punk juggernaut Fueled By Ramen. Front Bottoms have nothing to prove to people who’ve only recently heard of them, and yet whenever a grassroots success story starts to get mainstream attention, there’s the assumption that any alteration to their sound is trying to do just that. This is especially applicable in the case of Going Grey, which defies its title by dipping into the same fountain of youth as so many of the band’s Alt Press peers: ’80s pop.
It’s worked for Paramore, Now, Now, and Dreamcar, but in an extremely loose way, Front Bottoms’ trajectory can be best paralleled to that of Tegan and Sara—another duo that cemented their rep with brisk, loquacious dispatches from anxious twenty-something existence, then upgraded to a pastelled sheen shortly after making it to a major label. But Greg Kurstin and Jack Antonoff are nowhere to be found on Going Grey. Instead, singer-guitarist Brian Sella and drummer Mat Uychich self-produce with the help of Nicholas “RAS” Furlong, an Avicii collaborator who has written for Blink-182, Papa Roach and All Time Low in the past year. And though there’s nothing necessarily cynical or opportunistic about the sound they land on, the Front Bottoms approach synthesizers and Auto-Tune like guys who’d likely be just as happy playing as an acoustic duo, should it come to that. “Trampoline” and “Grand Finale” take the path of least resistance toward a sonic evolution by tacking on pitch-corrected vocals and puffy-paint synth leads; they end up sounding like demos for a "listens to Chvrches once" remix of what would otherwise be some of this band's least inspired writing.
Even if the retreat from guitar results in the most stylistically diverse Front Bottoms album, none of that really matters. Nor does Sella’s ability to ensure that every song on Going Grey is both hummable and quotable. We could talk all day about how “Don’t Fill Up on Chips” has an exquisite percussive arrangement, or how its chorus is one of their stickiest. It all comes down to how good words like “Feel most complete when we’re asleep/My head even with your hips, I’ll hug your knees” taste in your mouth before singing them back at Sella.
This is where the dividing line lies with Front Bottoms. It’s a relief, maybe even a revelation, for a guitar band to speak in this vernacular, to write about sex and friendship with an unpretentious candor that most avoid in favor of poetry or obscurity. The very same quality ensures that many will never make it to a song of theirs named “Bae,” let alone one that begins with an equally slangy, “When you realize the crew you roll with/Is actually what makes you anxious.” But a casual line on the chorus—“I gotta move my car/I gotta move your couch”—justifies the title. This isn’t a song about trying to act cool, but about how relationships rest on the essential, unglamorous terms of endearment that go unnoticed by everyone besides the ones who share them.
At its best, Going Grey brings little moments like these to light, tempering their exuberance with an embrace of adult obligation or a recognition of nostalgia’s futility. But too much of Going Grey seems oddly unwilling to risk offense—the concepts of “Far Drive,” “Everyone But You,” and “Grand Finale,” songs about various lovelorn states, could be the work of any pop-punker with a passing AP English grade, feeling as perfunctory and indistinct as the hyper-compressed, airless music surrounding them. Stella’s still got his tics, but by this point, they can feel like shtick. “You Used to Say (Holy Fuck)” exists mostly for its chorus, but it’s memorable for its profanity rather than its emotional payload. Elsewhere, he trips over stilted rhymes (“She started talking backwards/But nothing good it brings her/So next time that she sees him/It’ll be peace sign, middle finger”) or forced pop-culture nuggets (“You be Rachel and I’ll be bong rips”) with the indiscriminate, self-assured enthusiasm of a mid-level battle rapper or a “Weekend Update” host. Long-time fans will still hear it all as work of the Front Bottoms; newcomers may hear it in a Banana Republic. People over the age of 35 may possibly misremember some Barenaked Ladies song from their college years.
Whether it’s in ten years or even sooner, mark my words, the popularity of the Front Bottoms will no longer be treated as a shocking development. The day will come when we’ll hear about how their early live shows became the stuff of local legend, or how Talon of the Hawk defined someone’s entire 2013, or how “Twin Sized Mattress” inspired them to pick up a guitar. There are stories to be told about how Front Bottoms became one of the most successful indie rock bands to emerge in the past decade, but they won’t likely include Going Grey.
