Future Teens - Breakup Season (2019)

Just like their name implies, the Boston band Future Teens find themselves caught in a state of perpetual adolescence. Breakup Season, their sophomore album, is filled with songs about being deeply in love and then falling out of it, hard and indiscriminately. The band enjoy mimicking their inspirations, from organizing an entire Carly Rae Jepsen tribute album and, over the last cover weeks, sharing covers of emo contemporaries and tour mates Oso Oso and the Sidekicks, but they hit on a sweet combination of twangy rock all by themselves.

The band has two poles in the form of co-vocalists Amy Hoffman and Daniel Radin, and they wail at each other across a divide made up of craggy guitars and emotional pitfalls. They’re both lovesick and stressed, singing about how anxiety can swallow you whole and leave you alone, the very demons you’re trying to outrun causing your downfall. The album’s earliest singles — “Emotional Bachelor” and “Frequent Crier” — are open wounds with a sense of humor, but the band hit on sincerity just as often, like on “So What” or “Swiped Out,” a laundry list of memories that hit like constant disappointment, Hoffman singing: “Half of the time, we wished we had more time for this/ We were halfway…”

The album was supposed to come out next week, but Future Teens have delivered Breakup Season a little early. Listen to it below.