Goon Sax We'Re Not Talking (Dlcd)

It's not easy growing up. All the awkwardness, confusion, and emotional upheaval experienced on a daily basis can be pretty hard to handle. Now imagine doing it on-stage and on record. The members of the Goon Sax were only 17 when their first album, Up to Anything, was released -- it positively ached with growing pains and almost every song was cringingly real as if it was cribbed from a diary and set to sparsely hooky guitar pop. After time spent touring the world, gaining experience, and graduating high school, the band set out to make a more mature second record. For 2018's We're Not Talking, they hired Cameron Bird and James Cecil of Architecture in Helsinki to produce, brought in some string players, and paid far more attention to the arrangements of the songs. They wanted the record to hew closely to their idea of what a pop record should sound like and despite some clashes with Bird and Cecil, who have different ideas about the concept of pop, this is a wonderfully poppy record