"Serious Business," the first song on United Nations' The Next Four Years, opens with a bloody Cuisinart blur of power chords and blast-beating drums, vocalist Geoff Rickly letting out throat-flaying screams. It is a blinding place to touch down, like being deposited ass-first and blind-folded onto a five-lane superhighway. United Nations are a complicated semi-lark that Rickly, former lead singer of Thursday, has kept going in some form or another since 2005, and they have always practiced warfare via confusion. Their music is the point where unreadable intentions meet white-hot conviction: you might not know what they mean, exactly, but you understand they mean it with every fiber of their being. "This is serious business," Rickly shrieks on the song, a line with about seven trap doors around it. Seconds after he utters it, one of them yawns open: What is that familiar melody the chords are tracing? Oh right, that's the central motif of the Phantom of the fucking Opera.
It's a fascinating little quote, intentional or not, and it winks at the central concern of The Next Four Years: punk rock as (possibly exhausted) theater, and how a sagging, ticket-sale-hoovering mainstream behemoth like Phantom might have more in common with hardcore than meets the eye. Speaking with Pitchfork, Rickly was full of sardonic observations about the ways in which punk subcultures are inherently a series of petty squabbles: "It's maybe 10 different layers of hypocrisy: everything from a Minor Threat T-shirt being $28 at Urban Outfitters, to that being a thing where somebody would set up a whole set of ideals to combat the $28 Minor Threat shirt, to the fact that Minor Threat accidentally started straight-edge in the first place. There's so many layers to what's wrong with that."
In response, he's built The Next Four Years as an elaborate joke. The album is structured around the fake mythology of a band, beginning with their first cassette detailing their earliest days and progressing through two slightly more melodic and doomier 7"s before landing on what he calls the band's "pretentious phase of trying to sound like Godspeed! You Black Emperor." If you purchase the limited-edition box set from Temporary Residence, you can find these thematic distinctions made physical: A black tape, wrapped in the actual cease-and-desist order Rickly's band received from the real UN, two 7"s, and a 10" inch record. The packaging is covered in fake news stories from 2016-2021; in one, United Nations perform songs from their debut ("now available on vinyl as well as direct mindlink") in North Korea.
It's a stunning product and a black-belt level conceptual framework. Paging through it all, you can close your eyes and see the message board posts proliferating in its wake. But when you actually listen to the album, all of this subtext flies past you like fine print on the side of a bullet train. It's true that after an initial burst of of furiously scraping songs ("Serious Business, "Meanwhile On Main Street," "Revolutions At Varying Speeds"), the sound opens up slightly, allowing more space in between the hail of kick drums for richer melodies to bloom. And toward the back half, interludes of brooding clean-toned guitars ("F#A#$") bring the music to a brief resting pulse.
But taken as a whole, The Next Four Years moves like a piece of fine engineering—all curved lines, no wind resistance. "Revolutions at Varying Speeds" enters a cycle so brutal in its final seconds that it seems to be reversing on its axis. The same thing happens on "Between Two Mirrors" where the drums push the song gently into a wind sprint that gradually and gracefully winds back down, the song resting its hands on its knees and panting. There are little ghosts of melodies lurking here and there, in the interplay between the bass and the minor chords, and occasionally in the vocal lines.
Rickly has expressed concern that listeners will miss "the jokes" on The Next Four Years, which mostly take the form of self-inflicted gut blows and eye jabs. When he sings "Everything That We Touch Is Made for Sale" on "Meanwhile On Main Street", it's difficult to parse if it's a sincere sentiment or Rickly pulling a face at us. This is a band that started out performing in Reagan masks, after all, and good ol' Reagan's face shows up on the box set packaging in a very Dead Kennedys-esque collage. The punchline, in the end, might be that poking punk hypocrisy in the eye feels as familiar and unsurprising as punk itself. Subcultures are necessarily in love with rules—when you strip a subculture down to its skeleton, after all, what remains is a handful of rules—and Rickly ends the album, on "Music For Changing Parties", with the following chant: "Changing parties/ Always the same/ Changing lives/ Always the same/ Changing hearts/ Always the same/ Changing minds/ Always the same."
All of these Easter eggs help make United Nations an album fun to think about when it's not playing. But parsing The Next Four Years too closely, at least while it's on, flies in the face of the music's reason for being—that is, to blur together moments, to speed up time. Slowing it down would kill it, and the highest compliment I can pay The Next Four Years is that, no matter how often I play it, it's over before I've had time to think. Then, perplexed yet exhilarated, I play it again.
