Chicago emo band, Sweet Bike, make the sort of music that suggests sitting quietly with your feelings was never really an option. Blending emo and punk with plenty of scrappy unpredictability, the band has built a sound that can be deeply sincere one moment and ridiculously fun the next.
Their second album, "Get Off Your High Horse and Raise The Roof", gives them plenty of time to be loud about it. Across nine tracks, Sweet Bike pick through burnout, identity, shitty friends, capitalism, falling in love and the exhaustion of everyday life.
I’m breaking down the album track by track:
Sweet Bike Evil Band Theme Song
Before "Get Off Your High Horse and Raise The Roof " can properly begin, Sweet Bike introduce themselves with this cheeky opener, “Sweet Bike Evil Band Theme Song.” A few “fuck you”s and one deeply satisfied “Hell yeah!” later, it’s over. Barely a song, but a solid introduction into the type of band that Sweet Bike is.
Pigeons In My Hair
“Pigeons In My Hair”, is what happens when getting older fails to make you any better at being a person. “Every time I take three steps, I fuck it up and I’m a mess” arrives over bright, choppy guitars and punchy drums that five all that self loathing momentum. Everything pulls back around “Zoned out,” thinning the guitars and drums as the narrator gets stuck wondering “seriously, what am I doing?” For a song that spends so much time moving, it suddenly feels painfully stuck.
The song builds back up as the lyrics jump from sixteen to now, with the guitars filling out and the drums pushing harder breath the memory of hearing “Say Yes.” “I thought I’d stop crying when I’m older” turns the whole thing into a particularly cruel before and after. By “It's been four years, I’m still a mess,” the songs begins winding itself back down, leaving “Maybe that’s how I know it’s over” without much of a victory attached to it.
Shoeless Paystore
Shifting rhythms, tempo changes, and time signatures keep reshaping the song around “Feeling so lost inside my skin”, and the simple question “Put on a dress, do I fit in?” The music never stays comfortable for too long, stumbling into new shapes as the narrator does the same; mirroring awkward process of which parts of you are you, and which have been a mould of someone else’s expectations.
“Flowers growing from concrete,” offers something hopeful before “Tiny minded viewpoints that trap you in a box” turns the attention towards everything trying to contain that growth. As the music grows more forceful and assured, “Hold on to your loved ones, hold on to what you believe in,” feels like finally finding something solid amongst everything.
Some Fucked Up Violence
There’s plenty of ways to hurt yourself without ever leaving a mark, “Some Fucked Up Violence” finds a few of them. Throwing “Let me swallow your eyes, tell me what’s wrong inside” over jagged guitars and a twitchy, stop/start rhythm that never gives the song much room to breathe. “Fake my own death” and “Grind my brain stem” make that internal violence increasingly grotesque, while the music keeps jolting and twisting around. Even when things briefly open up around “How will time come to be defined now I lost my mind?” the extra space only seems to leave room for things to go wrong.
Amongst all the noise and gruesome imagery comes something annoyingly simple, “The hardest person you have to live with will always be yourself.” It shouldn’t hit harder than the idea of grinding down your own brain stem, but it does. The instrumentation closes back in as “Melt down and find your own hell” takes the thought to its natural conclusion.
Brazzer’s Castle
These are meant to be the good years. “Rotting in my prime,” makes a pretty convincing argument that they’re not, as restless guitars surround a burnt out narrator, terrified and watching as everything collapses around them. Drinking, smoking and dissociation become fairly ineffective ways of coping, while the song folds in on itself like the “amorphous seed” at its centre. Even searching through the dirt for something better only turns up “the tree of life bearing dead fruit.”
Things only get increasingly crowded as three vocal parts begin talking over one another. “Will all the tourists sleep sound?” and “Is the end really the end?” cut across the lead vocal until one person’s spiral starts sounding like a shared one. That polyphony carries into “All I see is garbage,” before “Accruing dividends, billions we can’t spend, trickle down to you” makes it pretty clear where some of that anger is directed. Then, after spending the song picking through capitalism’s rubbish, everything gives way to an almost Nintendo like outro; something you’d expect to hear at the end of a Super Mario level.
Sex Ender
It’s difficult to keep a community together when somebody has decided that they only really care about themselves. “Sex Ender” wastes very little time being polite about it, throwing “find out, get hit, with everything you did” over clipped guitars and sharp stops. “I thought that I could trust you, how quickly bonds can breaks” hurts because losing trust rarely stays between two people; eventually others get dragged in to deal with the gaps left behind. Even “Why am I smiling? Why am I laughing?” feels like reaching that reaching that point where you can’t control how your body reacts to the situation.
Any remaining patience disappears with “Serving yourself and no one else.” The guitars grow more abrasive as “I see through all your fucking lies” strips away the excuses until “Feign ignorance, hidden intent” leaves nowhere to hide. The ending breakdown arrives, doing what words apparently can’t, dropping everything into something heavier and uglier as all that frustration gets somewhere to finally escape to. Sometimes there isn’t much left to say once somebody has shown your their true colours.
Muddle of Pudd
Some mornings, you wake up and everyday tasks like opening your curtains and making coffee count as having your life together, “Muddle of Pudd” sits somewhere around there. A loose, chiming guitar line and easygoing rhythm make everything feel deceptively light, as “If I can keep my eyes open for once” turns seeing the sun into a small achievement. Giving up smoking and calling someone become equally tiny promises of improvement, until “Cheap reflections of who I used to be” reveals just how much thought has been hiding behind an otherwise ordinary morning.
For once though, all that overthinking actually seems to be getting somewhere. The arrangement pulls back around “That’s when you finally start,” before the guitars and drums pick up as the narrator starts tearing apart that “sick, sad heart.” “Tomorrows not always promised, but yesterday was not the end” is close to the sort of live, laugh, love posters you find but somehow it works without sounding cheesy. It could be because the song doesn’t pretend that feeling better means being fixed. Sometimes being able to open the curtains and mean “I’m glad to be alive” is more than enough.
L8 Nite TV
“L8 Nite TV” sounds like falling asleep in front of the television only to wake up somewhere worse. A haunting bassline opens the track almost alone, leaving plenty of space around “I find it safe most days” before the hazy guitars and restrained drums slowly drift in. That dreaminess makes the lyrics feel detached at first, as though being unable to “Change the channel” is merely another half awake inconvenience, with the sleepless thoughts, white noise and glowing screen accumulating until safety starts to look suspiciously similar to paralysis.
The song gets progressively heavier as the narrator keeps flipping through channels and finding “not a single fucking thing.” Guitars thicken, drums become more forceful and that dreamy atmosphere starts collapsing. By the final stretch, advertising language cuts through the noise, “We got a special offer, 12 easy payments,” until everything feels like one increasingly scrambled broadcast. Then amongst all that static, the track ends with a Cunk on Life sample that talks about Sonic The Hedgehog. It’s funny, a little silly but completely at home in a song that’s spent its time being paralysed in front of a glowing TV screen.
Lovetaps
After spending so much of Get Off Your High Horse and Raise The Roof tangled up in burnout, anxiety and simply making it through the day, “Lovetaps” closes things by looking across a room and finding somebody worth opening yourself up to. The image of bright green hair “flowing in the wind” gives the song an immediate warmth, while the guitars carry “you make me feel like gold, still shining in the heavy snow.” It’s a striking change of perspective from Sweet Bikes considering how much of the album is spent questioning reflections and getting trapped inside their own thoughts.
“When we both grow old” stretches one encounter into an imagined lifetime, while “your eyes are enchanting my soul” is so hopelessly romantic that it should feel a little embarrassing but it doesn’t. “You make me feel like flying” is delivered with enough sincerity that it’s difficult to argue with the sweetness.
As an album closer, “Lovetaps” doesn’t resolve every fear nor does it undo everything that came before it, instead it simple ends with the possibly that a connection can help lighten the weight of the world. After an album spent trying to figure out how to live with yourself, there’s something quietly hopeful about ending it with somebody else.