Every year, give or take a pandemic furlough, Hamilton Leithauser performs a multi-week residency at Café Carlyle. The tony Upper East Side cabaret lounge is not the natural habitat for an indie-rock veteran—this joint has a dress code (jackets mandatory for gentlemen) and a $95 two-course menu—but it fits with a certain borrowed elegance that has characterized the singer’s work outside the Walkmen. On his first solo album, 2014’s excellent Black Hours, he dallied with late-night strings and marimba, crooning like a Sinatra acolyte in 1961. His 2016 follow-up, a collaboration with Rostam, flirted with flamenco guitar and doo-wop throwbacks, while 2020’s The Loves of Your Life got mileage out of a pleasantly ageless folk-rock sound.
I wonder, though, what the well-heeled Carlyle clientele will make of This Side of the Island, which injects some welcome grit and aggression into Leithauser’s sound. It’s the first solo record he’s completed since a triumphant Walkmen reunion tour in 2023, and though he’d already begun work on the record at his home studio in Brooklyn, some of that pent-up energy seems to have settled here. Leithauser comes out swinging on “Fist of Flowers,” a song that had been percolating for more than eight years but didn’t feel complete until he brought in backing vocalists for a rollicking “doot-doo” refrain. The pounding rocker “Knockin’ Heart,” one of seven songs completed with the help of Aaron Dessner at his upstate studio, roils and shakes like a You & Me outtake, with Leithauser deploying big hooks and grand promises: “There’s no one who’s gonna need you like I do tonight,” he yowls.
The album suggests a loose beachside theme—songs called “Burn the Boats” and “Off the Beach”; Leithauser barefoot in a Hawaiian shirt on the back cover—but not in a restful vacation way, more in an ogling-the-waves-in-a-debaucherous-haze-while-your-life-crumbles way. Anarchic saxophone skitters around the edges of “Ocean Roar,” an off-center ballad memorializing the late Richard Swift, with whom Leithauser is wandering Wilshire Boulevard, lighting up cigars, as the song opens. Those good times are over; a later verse obliquely hints at Swift’s decline: “He used to stress the audience/Now he don’t care what we think.” Dessner’s fingerprints are most palpable on the kitchen-sink production of “Burn the Boats,” which pairs Leithauser’s lovesick ramblings with a big, hulking R&B groove. With a four-on-the-floor beat and backing singers who sound like they got the night off from Steely Dan’s Beacon residency, the track feels like it should collapse under its own weight but never does.
As a singer, Leithauser has a unique talent for posing the question, “What if Jon Bon Jovi spent his formative years gigging at Brownies instead of the Stone Pony?” He sounds down bad in every song, though he comes across as a happily married family man in interviews, and often what appears to be a wholesome love song at first blush reveals a darker narrative at close listen. You’ll hear “Off the Beach,” which opens with Leithauser crooning, “Eleven years since you walked the aisle,” and think, surely this is a tribute to the songwriter’s wife, who co-produced the record? But no, it’s a reminiscence sung by a narrator recounting his failed marriages and concluding, “Love is cheap, like a paper plate.” Leithauser understands that fucked-up romantics make for better songs than happily married men.
Like many albums recorded over many years, at various studios with different producers, This Side of the Island can feel a bit scattershot and piecemeal. The Dessner-produced ballad “What Do I Think?” is overstuffed—you could imagine a better version stripped down to the demo-like sparsity of early Walkmen—while the self-destructive character study “Happy Lights” could’ve been transplanted from Leithauser’s character-study album, The Loves of Your Life. Still, his ragged charisma holds it all together. “I just want you to love me the way I love you,” he howls, recounting a doomed relationship from his younger years, at the climax of “This Side of the Island”—the island being Manhattan, the side being the far Lower East Side, where Leithauser then lived not far from streets built, as he sings, “out of trash.” The same island where, today, you might need a dinner jacket to see him sing. You can take the boy out of the garbage, but his songs will always find their way back.
