Recommended Album: PACKS – ‘Melt the Honey’

On “Paige Machine”, a highlights from PACKS’ third and best full-length effort to date, Melt the Honey, Madeline Link proclaims, “It’ll only work once now / ‘Cause you took it apart / And in this new configuration / Fucked up, now you gotta restart.” Practicing what is preached can’t be seen as a detriment to the Toronto indie rock band’s creative approach of their latest album, however. Despite Link alongside her bandmates in guitarist Dexter Nash, bassist Noah O’Neil, and drummer Shane Hooper being a story of quick-turnarounds between each album cycle, having established a pace of short year-ish lapses between each effort might otherwise make any growth spurt harder to see on the surface, but where 2021’s Take the Cake led with an astute case of fuzzy melancholia and last year’s Crispy Crunchy Nothing leaving more than a filling morsel of grungy music munchies, Melt the Honey is absorbed by the energy of its surroundings, recorded across Mexico City and Xalapa’s Casa pulpo. Straight-lined architecture and clear sky views drip PACKS’ emotional psyche raw, leading to an expanded mindset where romantic ruminations are caught by psychedelic blurs and fully-weeded detours on more than occasional occurrence, allowing everything to sync with Link’s chilled out aura. The texture of PACKS’ sound becomes all the more stickier, be it guitars dazed and hazed in colorful clouds or a breeze of southern heat felt by regional indie rock influence. With much about love and life to be tasted in Melt the Honey, for sweet or bittersweet, PACKS are in their element when allowing natural inspiration to organically flow through them.

Highlights: “AmyW”, “Paige Machine”, “Missy”

PACKS’ Melt the Honey will be released January 19th on Fire Talk.

Buy | Stream