Rosie Tucker certain is aware of tips on how to seize your consideration with a gap line: “I hope nobody needed to piss in a bottle at work to get me the factor I ordered on the web.” That’s simply one of many anti-capitalist zingers within the brilliantly titled “All My Exes Stay in Vortexes.” Tucker rips trendy tradition aside in in Utopia Now!, a recent, biting, modern and unbelievable piece of indie-rock agit-prop tunecraft. These songs mix the 20-something malaise with a critique of the consumerist machine, and what it does to our brains.
The L.A. singer-songwriter (they/them) has already honed their chops on a couple of albums, together with the acclaimed 2021 Sucker Supreme, which received launched on Epitaph—and instantly received them dropped from the label. However Utopia Now! is a daring new starting, produced by Tucker with their collaborator Wolfy. Each music is filled with nice traces. “White Savior Fable” crams so many right into a mere 56 phrases: “The white savior fable received a very good night time’s relaxation/She is twenty minutes late and impeccably dressed / She is skinny like a teen and precisely as depressed.”
You would possibly hear That Canine or Juliana Hatfield within the sound, with a pop-punk crunch in Tucker’s guitar. However the mixture of playful humor and anger additionally evokes the Minutemen, as Tucker swerves between blunt propaganda and storm-in-my-house emotion. There’s no guardrail between the non-public and the political right here. Songs like “Undergo! Like You Imply It” and “Me Minus One Atom” (“I do know you’ll be with me after I die alone”) study how capitalism impacts the tiniest particulars of our day by day bummed-out lives. In “All My Exes,” Tucker sneers, “I’m only a middle-sized fish in a pile of plastic wider than Texas.”
Tucker sounds obsessive about the political, ethical, and creative failures of on-line tradition, particularly the company social-media manufacturers. Yeah, certain, you’ve heard a variety of indie rockers complain about web alienation, however not with this degree of wit—or one-liners as sharp as “I buried the lede however the bitch got here again.” “Lightbulb” ponders the artist’s life, at a time when expressing dissent simply turns into self-promotion. “Paperclip Maximizer” takes on workplace tradition, the place every employee turns into “a paragon of puritanical panoptical persistence,” but builds into the not-so-comforting lullaby, “Child, while you come to/You’ll discover that every part you like has been consumed.”
There’s no duds right here, however the choose hit on Utopia Now! could also be “Gil Scott Albatross.” Tucker warns, “They’re gonna flip the moon right into a sweat store,” feeling too weak to withstand: “If I flip my life right into a treadmill/Write me in a spreadsheet, lay me in a landfill.” But it surely builds right into a bona fide love music, about two people constructing an actual connection in the course of life’s day by day shitstorm. “What you give to me nobody can promote,” Tucker sings. “What you give to me nobody can frack/What you give to me can’t owe bail / What you give to me no app can observe.” That’s amore, circa 2024.
Utopia Now! is unquestionably a portrait of North America in our second, set in a tradition the place non-sponsored enjoyable is only a rumor, the place your telephone is spying on you, the place each small-time artist has to show right into a full-time huckster simply to maintain making their artwork. Even within the attractive Pavenent-style guitar ballad “Huge Fish/No Enjoyable,” Tucker sings the ironic punch line, “The metadata proves you’re the actual factor.” However in some way, Tucker manages to make it sound each romantic and horrifying—a typical feat for this nice album.
