Claire Rousay & More Eaze – Never Stop Texting Me

Pop-punk and emo culture are experiencing a resurgence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this new wave seems to come off the back of the current wave of Y2k nostalgia. Legacy acts like Avril Lavigne and Travis Barker are making lauded comebacks, while contemporary pop artists like Willow and current it-girl Olivia Rodrigo have ardently embraced the sound, thrusting loud and obnoxious guitar riffs and shouty confessionals back into the Top 40. It’s an approach that has already been seeping into the sphere of what has been considered the future of pop for some time now; hyperpop. This was likely inevitable. A significant source of the hyperpop subgenre has always been a nostalgia for 90’s and Y2K pop signifiers after all. That hyperpop, an internet born phenomenon on most accounts, should meet the pop-punk wave that was arguably the internet phenomenon of its own time, seems like a natural progression. A.G. Cook, the forefather of the genre, embraced 2000’s guitar pop on his sprawling Apple Vs. 7G, marrying soft alt-rock sounds with his inflated pop hooks and helium light auto-tune. But with this resurgence, something shifted in the way pop-punk is being consumed. For the first time, it feels like the genre is being taken very seriously.

Texas’s Claire Rousay is best known for her strange mix of ambient music and emo aesthetics, a formula that transplants the sad boi alt-rock of the Tumblr era into the scope of left-field electronica. Using voicemails, ASMR-like whispers, recordings of objects that create the ambient noise of daily life, for Rousay pieces the everyday carries impossible emotional gravitas. Her music has taken the seemingly mundane and blown it up in scale, emo in theory but more Burial in practice. Her collaborations with best friend Mari Maurice (More Eaze) have followed a similar trajectory, but have also given both artists the space to explore their poppier ambitions. Together the duo have created soundscapes that riff on and poke fun at popular and internet culture, an approach that has seen them pull from TikTok trends and meme culture as freely as they do from Jimmy Eat World. On their latest joint album, Never Stop Texting Me, they name drop Bandcamp Friday. In what may be their biggest shift away from total abstraction, Rousay and More Eaze mostly eschew drones and field recordings in favour of autotuned melodies and a tapestry of influences sewn from the threads that made up 2006’s emo countercultural boom. And they’re having a bit of a laugh while they’re at it.

Download Never Stop Texting Me here

With Never Stop Texting Me, Rousay and Maurice have set out to explore “moments which simultaneously satiates the desire to hear structure and the abstract.” Sometimes, they get there. Same opens the album with the sort of slow buzzing static ambience typical of the two, but this quickly shifts into a simple chord riff that twinkles behind a heavily auto-tuned melody. Just before anything settles though, Same is zapped back into cosmic ambience, as layers of auto-tuned harmonies and the subtle sound of rainfall create an intriguing vortex into what Never Stop Texting Me may offer. But it’s a bit of a bait and switch. What follows are a handful of tracks that function by way of hyperpop and pop-punk tropes in a way that feels a touch formulaic, but also intentionally satirical in their approach. Often, the liberal use of autotune turns whatever Rousay and Maurice may be singing into a series of indiscernible alien mumbles, like a commentary on the absurd non-enunciation vocal style of classic pop-punk tracks (hi, Fall Out Boy). iphone2, a song about two people lamenting their disconnect over one party only being able to afford an iPhone 2, feels like a jab at Cook and his legion of Gen-Zs whose lives are lived by way of TikTok. On the truly hilarious Art, Roussay and Maurice use the braggadocio of Cardi-B to glamourise the life of a starving artist, speaking the lines “cashing out PayPal because we just got paid, ordering UberEats with cash from Bandcamp Day” with the same gusto as “these expensive, these is red bottoms, these is bloody shoes.”

It becomes pretty apparent that Never Stop Texting Me is a work that relies on a degree of satire and irony. It probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously. According to Roussay and Maurice, “the album is funny, sad, interesting, accessible, and very honest.” Its honesty lies in its parody of the countercultures from which it takes inspiration, reminding us that before it became a hotly theorised and canonised genre, hyperpop itself was a parody of pop’s most ridiculous and vapid parts. Never Stop Texting Me is another entry that speaks toward the duo’s greatest strength; their wicked cultural commentary. Their sense of humour and unparalleled penchant for irony feels like a necessary grounding to our understanding of current trends, a reminder of the ridiculousness at the heart of it all.

Listen to Art from Never Stop Texting Me below.