In the Fall of 2016, Speedy Ortiz went to Brooklyn's Silent Barn to record what they thought would be their third LP, but following election day they knew they had to change course. “The songs on the album that were strictly personal or lovey dovey just didn’t mean anything to me anymore - that’s not the kind of music I’ve found healing or motivating in the past few years, and I was surprised I’d written so much of it,” explains front person Sadie Dupuis. “Social politics and protest have been a part of our music from day one, and I didn’t want to stop doing that on this album.” So the band scrapped the album they made, Dupuis wrote more songs over the course of four months, and Speedy Ortiz created the urgent, taught, and pointedly witty Twerp Verse.
On Twerp Verse, Speedy Ortiz accelerate the band's idiosyncrasy through the wilderness of Dupuis' heady reflections on sex, lies and audiotape while adding surprising textures like Linn drums and whirled guitar processing to their off-kilter hooks. Dupuis, whose electropop solo project Sad13 debuted in 2016 shortly after her own move to Philadelphia, has become more instinctive in her songwriting - her home-recorded demos mirror Twerp Verse's songs in a closer way than any other Speedy record. The band's camaraderie and crate-digging is evident, with diffuse reference points like Squeeze, Hop Along, Prince, Paramore, and Brenda Lee being sucked into the band's chaos. Even when Dupuis sings of alienation and political weariness, the pop maelstrom swirling around her provides a defiantly charged, mussed-but-hooky optimism.
"You need to employ a self-preservational sense of humor to speak truth in an increasingly baffling world," says Dupuis on the album title Twerp Verse. "I call it a ‘twerp verse' when a musician guests on a track and says something totally outlandish – like a Lil Wayne verse – but it becomes the most crucial part. I like ‘twerp’ as a diss, but in this meaning, the twerp is doing a service--shaking things up by being bold, not complacent, never silent.” Tuned smartly to the political opacity of the present, Twerp Verse rings clear as a bell.
Release: April 27th, 2018, Carpark Records
Words: Carpark/Stop Start
On Twerp Verse, Speedy Ortiz accelerate the band's idiosyncrasy through the wilderness of Dupuis' heady reflections on sex, lies and audiotape while adding surprising textures like Linn drums and whirled guitar processing to their off-kilter hooks. Dupuis, whose electropop solo project Sad13 debuted in 2016 shortly after her own move to Philadelphia, has become more instinctive in her songwriting - her home-recorded demos mirror Twerp Verse's songs in a closer way than any other Speedy record. The band's camaraderie and crate-digging is evident, with diffuse reference points like Squeeze, Hop Along, Prince, Paramore, and Brenda Lee being sucked into the band's chaos. Even when Dupuis sings of alienation and political weariness, the pop maelstrom swirling around her provides a defiantly charged, mussed-but-hooky optimism.
"You need to employ a self-preservational sense of humor to speak truth in an increasingly baffling world," says Dupuis on the album title Twerp Verse. "I call it a ‘twerp verse' when a musician guests on a track and says something totally outlandish – like a Lil Wayne verse – but it becomes the most crucial part. I like ‘twerp’ as a diss, but in this meaning, the twerp is doing a service--shaking things up by being bold, not complacent, never silent.” Tuned smartly to the political opacity of the present, Twerp Verse rings clear as a bell.
Release: April 27th, 2018, Carpark Records
Words: Carpark/Stop Start
RSS Feed
