Album Review: Not Boyz Anymore

Soda Boyz are Aotearoa’s premier proponents of slowcore, having honed their delivery to emphasize the negative space, leaving audiences hanging on every note. Their sophomore album Not Boyz Anymore, was released digitally while the band were in the midst of an Australian tour.

Slowcore has remained one of those avant-garde sort of genres throughout its history. It has cousins like shoegaze and dream pop that have their fingers into so much stuff from Deftones to Mazzy Star and slowcore has always been another step or two removed from that. All of that is to say though that slowcore and Soda Boyz in particular have a really accessible and sonically enjoyable style.

Where usually outsider genres have some kind of key aspect that is almost built to vet listeners in a way that asks “can you tolerate this until you acquire the taste?” Soda Boyz merely asks you to be patient and lean in. So much music asks you to like a certain kind of noise, where Not Boyz Anymore only asks you to like music – which seems like such a benign statement that there’s no point in writing it, but it feels like a revelation to me because I listen to so much music that involves discomfort.

You can play this album in a second hand shop as much as you can sit in a concrete bunker and deconstruct it.

As soon as I started the first track, right as the opening lines, “This is my body, I know,” slid like a spineless fish into my ears over loosely vibrating guitars bereft of harsh jangles, I felt my shoulders relax a little. I hope I’m making enough sense and that you can read the intention behind what I’m saying: it felt strangely close to the sensation I get when my partner pushes her thumb into my forehead. The tones and bends were vaguely nostalgic, like Sonic Youth or Early Pumpkins. It felt comforting in that way, but there were also so many interesting, unstable chords and relationships. All of these choices felt so natural as well, to the point I would catch myself wondering how these angular flats and sharps were feeling so round. I can only guess it’s the space and the texture that let your brain catch up to the sound, get used to it and begin to trust it.

These wonderful, creative interactions between notes felt so natural. A song like Post Spa 2 would have instrumentation that hit like a Crowded House song at first, pretty and poppy, but then on these odd occasions these strange metallic sounds would come through, and it would sort of take the gravity out of the space between your skull and your brain for a second. You’d kind of stand beside yourself while also rotate around the moon and cut yourself out of your own life like a cigarette burn on an old film negative. But all of that would be in the blink of an eye, and you somehow felt like that part did exactly what it was supposed to.

With such a generally slow style of music, I did notice that there wasn’t much room for different song tempos over the album run time. By the time the 7-minute epic, Sharon, came on, there was this feeling that Not Boyz Anymore was lurching ever-gradually towards slower and slower tempos. (By the way this is not really a criticism. Tonnes of artists work with a specific tempo range as part of their creative boundaries.) But Soda Boyz used those implied boundaries to create this great moment when the last track, Rocky, starts; and it’s more upbeat than any of the other songs and, crucially, more upbeat than I thought the scope was for this album. It’s a testament to the power of restraint that it made me imagine these margins for what I was listening to and then being genuinely surprised in a delightful way when they were blown open. Rocky is a wash of dissonance in a poppy sensibility, all buried between moody, impulsive playing and fragmented composition. But again, out of nowhere comes this really solid backbeat drum groove that’s nothing like the pensive taps of the tracks before it. It feels like the band was keeping a few tricks up their sleeve, waiting to slingshot them into your face for the final send-off. That breaking of imaginary rules that I’d made up in my head from listening to the rest of the album was such a kick. I never got to experience it quite the same way on later listens but I remember it so fondly.

Soda Boyz have cemented themselves in the slowcore history books with this release. A brilliant sophomore album full of gentle, effortless beauty and clouds of musical feedback. Their work continues to show a thoughtfulness and attention to detail that leaves the listener feeling safe and in good hands. Not Boyz Anymore is a coming of age piece that feels introspective and insular, like a private little world that’s always there to curl up in. Not ignoring the woes and wear of life but softening the edges of it and holding it at a distance where one can look at them like little artifacts and reflect.