Deeper

You can't understand Deeper if you're standing still. That's by design, says Nic Gohl of the Chicago quartet. "Does it feel good when you hear this song? Does your body want to move to it?" He asked himself those questions as he and bandmates Shiraz Bhatti, Drew McBride and Kevin Fairbairn prepared their third album, Careful! (to be released Sept. 8, 2023), which is also their debut on Sub Pop. "I wanted the songs to be interesting, but in a way that a two-year-old could sing along to," Gohl says. "Basically, it's pop music."

That "basically" is a pretty hard sell, as fans of their previous 2nd album, 2020's Auto-Pain, might guess. Auto-Pain was an album of thick brutalist architecture, full of straight lines and sharp angles that made hard shapes strong enough to carry a heavy thematic load. On "Careful!" the facades are redesigned and splashed with color, not reimagining the sound but rather testing its limits. There are synth experiments, there are moments of nauseatingly powerful darkwave and coldbeat. There are massive rock songs that you can imagine 10,000 people singing along to in a beautiful outdoor setting. There is a remarkably moving love song. Is there pop? There is some pop, yes, a wiry piece of Cars-esque neon called "Everynight." If you look around the right corners, you might see some old buildings shining through, too, but in this context - for example, on a song like "Sub," which started out as a slow and dark prog jam but is now an elegantly swelling post-punk wave - they feel more sophisticated, illuminated by the cold, bright glow of bands like Television.

The album's title, exclamation point and all, comes from the song "Airplane Air," and it's echoed in the album's final song, "Pressure," a song Gohl wrote for his wife and longtime partner. "Be safe," he sings, "I will need you around." It's a song that sounds like nothing else in their catalog - ringing harmonies, ringing chords, vocal harmonies - but the sense of interdependence is at the heart of Deeper's music, from the way Gohl and McBride's guitars fit together and mesh with Bhatti's drum patterns and Fairbairn's bass to the lyrical vulnerability at the album's core. That sense of commonality makes this restlessly curious, stylistically wide-ranging album feel like the most coherent portrait of Deeper. Or, as McBride ultimately puts it, "Careful! is about taking care of each other."