Picture this: You’re lying face down on your bed on a beautiful spring afternoon; you haven’t opened the curtains in days. Your phone is on Do Not Disturb—not that anyone’s texting you anyway, you’ve been such a bummer since she dumped you—with one caveat: You’ll answer the ring, allow it to disrupt your endless wallowing, if the voice on the other line belongs to her.
Alien Boy make music for precisely this scenario, and the dozens of John Hughes-ian permutations that remind us why we call it a crush. In the world of Alien Boy, infatuation is dire, existential, and all-consuming. Why love at all, they ask, if you aren’t going to commit yourself completely? Since its inception in 2015, the Portland, Oregon four-piece has paired a sense of infinite longing with guitars that seem to stretch out forever, warped by chorus and reverb until they, too, become all-consuming, a dream-like sound befitting a band living in a romantic fantasy. On their third album, You Wanna Fade?, Alien Boy fill out the corners of their cinematic vision, layering synthesizers and drum machines atop their three-guitar swirl.
From the outset, Alien Boy’s melodies sound grander, their songs more ambitious and widescreen, than on previous records. The instrumental opener “Scrub Me Clean” is something like an overture, a gossamer web of tambourines and kick drums, guitars and synthesized strings, and bleeps that recall the cheerful chirp of a touch-tone telephone. Wordlessly, it captures an ecstatic despair, the same kind of melodramatic rush one might feel listening to the first 10 seconds of “How Soon Is Now?” on a continuous loop, before the guitars swell and crash into “Changes.”
With three guitarists—lead vocalist and lyricist Sonia Weber, along with Caleb Misclevitz and A.P. Fiedler—Alien Boy’s sound seems to expand and contract at a moment’s notice, shifting from breezy jangle pop to soaring solos on “Changes,” constructing towering walls of reverb on “Cold Air,” wielding feedback like a weapon on “Another Brand New Me.” Small flourishes—the Mellotron on “Morning”; more buzzing bleeps on “You Want Me Too”—carve out brief respites from the pedal-laden layers of guitar that dominate the album. At just under 45 minutes, You Wanna Fade? is by far Alien Boy’s longest record; hooks feel harder fought, verses give way to guitar solos as shouted choruses. But these are welcome expansions and experiments for a band that has spent the past decade distilling power-pop heartbreak down to its essence.
As a lyricist, Weber has a knack for knowing how to twist the knife deeper into her own heart. On “Pictures of You,” she’s hearing phantom phone calls and praying her crush will drop by unannounced, living in a fantasy because it’s easier than admitting the loneliness of the truth. The forthrightness in her writing undercuts any attempt at irony. She admits to every petty desire on “Cold Air”; screams, “I broke my world/I broke it for you,” on “I Broke My World”; is coming “undone” on “Another Brand New Me.” As a result, even an extravagantly emo line about hating change on “Everything Stays” or a mouthful of a verse on “Changes” feels of a piece with the project as a whole.
There’s a strange degree of self-possession in Alien Boy’s self-immolation. Weber sings without a tremble or a whimper, every line delivered as a shout, as if to say, So what, I’m a hopeless romantic! At least I own it! And maybe that despair is its own armor: When every stray glance or missed call feels like life or death, self-censorship begins to lose its appeal. On You Wanna Fade?, Alien Boy make desperation sound defiant.
