No matter what advice you could give your younger self in retrospect, growing up was always going to suck. Navigating those adolescent years—particularly middle school, the tour de force of puberty, rejection, and angst—is key to figuring yourself out. New York four-piece T-Rextasy write indie-pop cheers for tackling that preteen insecurity. It’s a natural inclination, given that the band formed during its final year of high school. But on their sophomore LP, Prehysteria, T-Rextasy are too busy emphasizing cliches to leave room for wit or insight—traits that strengthen camp when flexed a little more subtly.
It’s clear T-Rextasy pushed themselves musically with Prehysteria. The band’s jangly power-pop sketches reach farther than before, dabbling with trumpet and trombone, reviving 1960s girl-group harmonies, and toying with stripped-down versions of ska. The faux-frail delivery gives songs like “Rip Van Vintage” the feeling of a Deerhoof cover, full of pent-up energy and saccharine falsettos. But the steadfast campiness of their lyrics could’ve been ghostwritten by a children’s band. Songs about ditching a lover for breakfast (“I Don’t Do Lunch”), embracing acne (“The Zit Song”), or horny makeout sessions (“Coffee?”) opt for obvious laughs without much, if any, commentary to elevate them beyond the elementary. Legitimizing adolescent struggles is a worthy endeavor, no doubt, but T-Rextasy bog their banter down with coffee-bean innuendos and empty odes to Etsy, content to shoehorn influences like the B-52’s and Sister Rosetta Tharpe into the music instead of the lyrics.
On paper, Prehysteria’s narrative has sharper fangs than the record itself. Vocalist Lyris Faron, bassist Annie Fidoten, guitarist Vera Kahn, and dummer Ébun Nazon-Power describe the album as them “owning our madness.” That concept is on par with their past. T-Rextasy’s biggest hits off their 2016 full-length Jurassic Punk, “Chick’n” and “Gap Yr Boiz,” were clap-backs against street harassment and pseudo-enlightened crushes. Those raggedy, self-empowered anthems attracted a fanbase eager to hear more—using Indiegogo, T-Rextasy crowdsourced over $3000 to create Prehysteria—but the summation of Prehysteria’s themes in press releases and interviews oversold the reality of its middling subject matter.
Quirkiness isn’t a personality. T-Rextasy seem to remember that when struggling to cross the queer friendzone on pop-punk charmer “Girl, Friend” and while emphasizing intentionally cloying harmonies on the album’s post-punk tentpole, “Theme from Prehysteria.” But elsewhere, the band misses opportunities to use their vibrant music as a platform for meaningful takeaways, regardless of how comedically it’s presented. There’s a reason the emotionally quotidian stories of acts like the Front Bottoms and Hobo Johnson or the charmingly sardonic kitsch of Childbirth and Tacocat flourished. T-Rextasy reiterate the importance of speaking out against sexism and tokenization in interviews, but their music does little to define who or what they want to champion beyond basic critiques of beauty standards and the queer dating scene. Like the band’s playful moniker, Prehysteria reinforces the idea that T-Rextasy are an outlet for goofing off with friends to prove that you can. The only drawback of that is expecting people to feel as liberated as you supposedly did while making it.
