NO DREAM Review

Right on cue to ease the lockdown blues, today one of my favourite punk rockers (and a man I recently talked about admiring) Jeff Rosenstock dropped a brand new album with no forewarning at all, titled NO DREAM.

Having loved all of Rosenstock’s solo work up until this point, I generally had high hopes for this album, although I wasn’t a huge fan of his most recent release, his collaboration EP Still Young With Laura Stevenson, so that tempered my expectations a little. Fortunately, NO DREAM is a raucous return to form, with the signature fuzzy, garage guitar sound and manically energetic vocals that many of Rosenstock’s fans know and love being the focal point of the record. It seems less produced than some of his previous solo work, seemingly taking a contrarian tracjetory away from higher fidelity in order to maintain his punk roots, but it suits his sound perfectly.

This record is a beautiful mess - it feels like it has a lot of emotions, it doesn’t necessarily know how to express them all coherently but it’s going to try its damnedest to do so anyway - and I think that’s exceptionally relatable for a lot of people right now. Solid, will be on repeat for the next week, 8/10.