We should have all learned better by now that when it comes to Charly Bliss, you can never count them out in leaving you with a lasting impression. Yes, they’re still towing along guitars throughout their third album, FOREVER, but they don’t exactly sound like a guitar band anymore either, and that makes fans of their 2017 modern cult classic debut Guppy mad on the Internet. This is premium grade guitar-pop done right, though, with an emphasis on the pop side of their sound. It’s everything the band told us they were when they began pivoting toward synth-pop and embraced becoming something more of a Charly Rae Jepsen than a ’90s grunge-pop revival act.

The latter hasn’t totally disappeared from their DNA here on FOREVER, even if the emergence of a saxophone on “Nineteen” sounds like Eva Hendricks’ is wistfully looking at running away with her lover from the other side of that story. It’s just that the same electric-spiral structures built for turbo-charged hooks are now even more bedazzled in the band’s sparkling studio trickery, in turn giving Hendricks’ wide-eyed emotions on shitty relationships, adulting (or the lack thereof,) and meta critiques on their own aging buzz band status the proper pedestal they deserve to reach those ambitions, blowing you away with a crack of wit and sugar-sweet chorus for good measure.

There’s a lot of pop music being made nowadays that isn’t honest about what it wants to be — or that stands the test of time, for that matter — but Charly Bliss have been up front about what they wanted to become from the very start. FOREVER is foremost, fun, as pop music should be, even when it sheds some tears. Yet, it also hears the band realizing their own freedom to figure out whatever they want from this life they’ve chosen as starving artists. As the sun’s summer kisses fade into the cool of fall, Charly Bliss’ music here is just like that: something that hits you just right in the moment and sticks to your heart from that point on.

Highlights: “Calling You Out”, “Nineteen”, “In Your Bed”

Charly Bliss’ FOREVER is available now on Lucky Number.

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