The Front Bottoms’ newest album “Going Grey” features the band’s experimentation with a new sound with a tendency to stick to their folk-punk roots.

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The New Jersey duo, in previous albums, have traditionally shown a reluctance to play along with the glamour and trends of the indie-punk world.  Despite their seeming ignorance to trends, frontman Brian Sella has the standard voice of the genre. Whiny and youthful, his vocals aptly mirror the band’s lyrics: angsty songs about hard-to-get girls, low self-esteem and getting stoned. What gives The Front Bottoms their signature sound, however, setting them apart from the sea of whiny punk boys, is their ability to pithily discuss these topics without metaphor or obscurity, something that “Going Grey” is not an exception to.

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As Sella sings about love and friendship across the entirety of the album he does so through trademark tongue-in-cheek straightforward lyrics, without pretentious poetics. However, that isn’t to say that “Going Grey” is absent of raw emotion.  In fact, the sheer honesty of their lyrics makes the band that much more self-aware, something their fans have always related to.

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What remains constant in “Going Grey” is The Front Bottoms’ consistent ability to turn these self-aware ramblings into feel good bops, such as in “Everyone But You,” which describes the difficulty to move on from a break-up when finding everyone else in the world irritating or the lonely-boy anthem “Vacation Town.” Whether that be the song’s pounding, brass-heavy chorus, reminiscent of a happy  summertime montage from an indie film or its shout-sung second verse during which Sella’s statement of his inability to speak his mind (“Physically another continent/emotionally another headspace/mentally I’m not even here”) is clearly the high point of the song, spoken over the band’s typical heavy drum beat, the Front Bottoms demonstrate that they haven’t lost the ability to turn low self-worth into a relatable crowd pleaser.   

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However, though The Front Bottoms mostly stick to their roots, “Going Grey” features the introduction of an instrument many indie punk fans genuinely fear: synthesizer, an instrument not typically used in a genre reliant on low-budget sound and heavy drum kit and artistic acoustic sets, but, rather, indicative of mainstream pop music trends. The synth makes its first appearance in the album’s first track, “You Used to Say (Holy Fuck),” which hypnotically begins slowly and dreamily before electronic accents intertwine with an otherwise typical punk rock base.  This track sets the album up as different from the rest of the band’s discography right off the bat, no matter how slight this difference may be.  It is in songs like “Trampoline” and “Grand Finale,” though, where the band demonstrates their growth from their acoustic, folk-punk pre-“Back on Top,” days, as tracks’ use of synth is no longer tastefully intertwined but a main focus. The use of the synth, though mostly subtle, could indicate a new era of sound for The Front Bottoms, who have usually stuck to the stripped down punk sound their fans have relied on for almost a decade.

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Nonetheless, the band is ultimately almost entirely recognizable to their long term fans. It is in chill tracks like “Don’t Fill Up on Chips,” which begins with Sella’s raw whiny vocals and does not escalate in intensity where the Front Bottoms return to their roots.  The calming back beat coupled with the falling xylophone is reminiscent of early Front Bottoms, and the lyrics reflect their past discography as well.  With statements like, “Fill up the space that I don’t need/I feel most complete when I’m asleep/My head even with your hips I hug your knees,” the Front Bottoms demonstrate their ability to create sentiments that ring true for reasons a listener is not quite able to put his or her finger on:  not really containing anything “special,” the Front Bottoms seem to still be relying on self-aware candor.