Lifeguard are an anomaly for a band of their generation. Not many young adults around their age these days care about music made beyond the ’90s timeline, but the Chicago trio of bassist and vocalist Asher Case, guitarist and vocalist Kai Slater, and drummer Isaac Lowenstein have proven time and time again that they’re studying up on the history of punk and indie rock through depths spanning their literal parents’ generation. Like those original agents of amped-up chaos and the close communities they built in their new sounds, their music nerdiness has them done a hell of a favor in making them stand out with an authentically exciting energy.

Ripped and Torn, Lifeguard’s debut full-length, overdelivers in that regard. It’s also an evolution on what they began plotting out back on their 2022 EP, Crowd Can Talk, a promising post-hardcore introduction to the Hallogallo scene leaders, and 2023’s more calculated extension on that noise, Dressed In Trenches, which both made a fan out of the hard-to-please Steve Albini. As with any younger person encountering growth spurts in their identity, so are Lifeguard here. We’ve already heard Slater flex his own phenomenal power-pop understandings with Sharp Pins over the past year, and in a collective sense, we’re now hearing he, Case, and Lowenstein put all of the sounds of the past’s more intellectualized punk pieces together in the present tense, giving new life to that fire while ensuring their own young legacy will also remain timelessly etched in scraping signals (“A Tightwire”, “Under Your Reach”), droning calls (“How to Say Desair”, “France And”), and distorted, jangled marches (“It Will Get Worse”, “Like You’ll Lose”) with a tight hold around pop melody and loose, crashing fits of combustibility.

The production is also perfect for their product. Any No Age stan would be remissed to overlook their own existing bias relating to all things touched by Randy Randall and Dean Spunt, but seeing that Randall was the producer hands Lifeguard ultimately chose to work with in the studio on their first full-length outing shows how they understood the importance of work with a kindred spirit who also shares the ethos of truly DIY-minded indie-punk blazed by the likes of Wipers, Mission of Burma, and Guided By Voices. Channeling everything into mono compresses Ripped and Torn‘s sound aesthetically into that similarly of their guitar heroes, but also emphasizes that unglossed, raw live energy which they hope to connect their music with audiences whenever they’re playing it out in the wild. There’s little left behind the surface of what Lifeguard are doing right now, because it’s all the real deal.

Highlights: “A Tightwire”, “It Will Get Worse”, “France And”

Lifeguard’s Ripped and Torn will be released June 6th on Matador Records.

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