I first became aware of Booze Radly back in 2020. I noticed that their name came up in conversations concerning a number of bands I was following at that time, and of course, they had that name... puns and literary references are archetypal naming conventions for emo bands, and Booze does them both!* Needless to say, they raised my brow line, even if I didn't pay them much mind at the time. That is until they followed me on Twitter and I noticed that their pfp was just Strong Sad wearing one of their shirts. That REALLY piqued my interest. If there was ever an unsung mascot of third-wave underground emo from the '00s, one that no one cops to or otherwise will acknowledge their psychic/thematic debt to, it's that particular lachrymose marshmallow from the Homestar Runner universe. So why have I waited to write about them until now? Well, they have a new EP out titled Lose, Badly, so the timing is right. But also, frankly, because I was afraid to cover them. I thought they'd be too much my sorta thing and that I wouldn't actually have anything interesting to say about them. I'm glad that's not ended up being the case. Despite being, maybe, technically, a fourth-wave emo band (formed in 2013), they have more of a lo-fi type of fifth-wave feel, in that they tend to view any kind of alternative rock or variety of subcultural tendency (past or present) as fair game as far as inspiration goes. The first song off Lose, Badly** makes their scattershot, irreverent, and highly referential style immediately clear, being a swoopy-haired pop-punk number titled "White Guy Emo," which takes the entire Warped Tour-era trend of misogynistic and self-pitying screeds against ex-girlfriends to task while engaging in a fun, accurate, and somewhat crunchy reenactment of the period's powerchord fueled tropes. It's somehow perfectly logical then for the band to transition from this moody pastiche to the dizzy guitar sweeps and messy acid-fried garage rock of "Hydro Illogical," which then feels in total continuity with the spacy post-hardcore and chrome-plated, backwoods racer "Crash and Burn." Underlying their heavy melodicism and distortion forward guitar work is a solid sense of pop songwriting, which makes the transition between all these vignettes, which combine like a montage of the soundtrack from a VHS skate demo, to align and become perfectly in sync when the vibe shifts to full-on, AJJ-fancying, busker punk with songs like "Unlearning Sadness." I genuinely appreciate the fact that the lyrics throughout Lose, Bradly read like something Ben Gibbard would write for Joyce Manor, and that they can come across as totally sincere while also making me laugh. This might all sound like a lot, and it is, but that's ok, because it all eventually reaches a strangely, barbaric fusion and pinnacle on the penultimate track; the progressively theatrical "Admission of Infirmity," which starts out as a kind of drama-club version of At the Drive-In which quickly descends and devolves into a cathartic and bloody sounding summoning ritual set to the tune of groaning background chants and some heavy, brooding, psyched-out thrash grooves that could just as easily of appeared in the bridge of a late '80s hardcore record as they do here. It turns out Booze Radly is my kind of thing, after all. Just, not in the way I was expecting. Take it from me and don't hesitate a minute longer; the only way you can "lose" when it comes to this record, is if you never give it a spin in the first place.
