Who says you have to be in the same room to create? Indie pop bedazzlers Hot Freaks—Leo Vondracek (vocals), Sarah Alfano (bass), Cody Brown (drums), and Celeste Heule (keyboards)—swapped songs and tidbits between Minneapolis, LA, and South Dakota. But it was as though they sat directly across from one another. That’s the intimacy vibrating in their new album, Soft Body, an 11-track funkadelic pop set that bursts from the seams with poignant lyrics and shiny arrangements, with a shimmering exterior. Tim Evenson (of Pleasure Horse) opened his home for the band to lay down the songs. What the listener experiences is a giddy-up, propulsive, and downright charming project that feels both earnest and fluid.
Hot Freaks crack open the bedeviling “Darkest of the Dark Nights” with a trembling, almost haunting, guitar with equally evocative harmony. “It don’t feel right!” the group caterwauls into their microphones. That deep-chested cry is both one of defiance and hopelessness, nestled in fine-tuned musical weeds. Percussion roars, and piano radiates like beams from the mid-autumn sun. “Getting Over You” emerges with the giddy-up of a herd of walking ponies, whereas the pro-choice rally “I Want Baby to Love Me” features this playfully serious: “I’m never having sex again tonight / I’d rather read a book or ride my bike.”
Soft Body twirls ’round and ’round with the energy not unlike a carnival ride. From “Big Arms Boyfriend” and the sobering “Childhood Friends” to the chirpy “This Way Feels Like the Hardest,” the band collects a vasty array of twinkling things coated with deep themes about relationship dynamics and the quest for real human connection in the all-consuming digital age. Even “10 Boys, No Girls,” which feels like a charming jingle from the 1950s, carries with it a textured thematic smattering.
Hot Freaks flip through cherished favorites and new cuts for a bold and buoyant record that’s so deceiving that you’ll forget to actually check out the lyrics. When you do, you’ll find an album that speaks to the very uncomfortable existence we all traverse until the finish line. There are just some things you can never avoid.
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