When Marnie Stern stepped away from the recording world following her 2013 album, The Chronicles of Marnia, she sought out stability. The NYC experimental guitar dynamo found it in the form of a career musician gig as part of Seth Meyers’ Late Night 8G Band as well as going nuclear family, but as it turns out, you can’t contain Stern’s creative energy within traditional structures. The Comeback Kid, Stern’s fifth full-length and first new music in a decade, is the subsequent equal or opposite reaction an artist like her could only create: singular and signature in her skills as a fast, finger-tapping shredder who creates big vibrations alien against all other sounds in the independent rock universe. More than anything, the dozen tracks that zip through this 28-minute thriller are a spectacle to experience, like witnessing some form of long-lost space object reemerging and burning a hole into our atmosphere (in this case, the atmosphere in question being made of melodic indie rock milquetoast which has saturated the environment in her absence.) The Marnie Stern of 2023, during her domestic stint, has also taken away something vital from those years of living as a “normie” in how it necessitated an outlet to remain daring through art. The listen is a beguiling flex of ecstatic math rock and blazing metal axes swerving time sigs in every which way — albeit, arguably more compact and digestible than anything she has created to date. She understood the assignment, however, in that she’s come back to this Earth inspired to change the shape of guitar rock by filling its voids.

Highlights: “Believing Is Seeing”, “Working Memory”, “Earth Eater”

Marnie Stern’s The Comeback Kid is available now on Joyful Noise Recordings.

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