Los Angeles indie-rock act Cheekface are back with their first new music since the January release of their second album Emphatically No., sharing the lyric video for their new single “We Need a Bigger Dumpster” on Monday.
The track finds the trio (guitarist and “singing person Greg Katz, bassist and “other singing person” Amanda Tannen, and drummer Mark “Echo” Edwards) up to their usual tricks, setting Katz’s wry speak-singing to chipper pop-rock, both of which belie the song’s despair. Katz reels off his usual one-liners and nonsequiturs like “Fritos isn’t free” and “Seal Team 6 is here saging everything,” insisting that “Everything is fine,” despite plentiful evidence to the contrary in the form of an ever-rising dumpster fire—a disaster that won’t stop snowballing.
It’s hard to blame Cheekface for feeling down, particularly considering the pandemic’s cognitive dissonance is arguably at its peak. While vaccine rates continue to shoot up and inspire hope in the States, COVID is more deadly than ever elsewhere in the world, a fact of which Cheekface seem keenly aware. “I caught a cold / I coughed on all my friends / Now everyone is coughing on everybody else / And we’re coughing on our doctors and our doctors cough out: / ‘Everything is fine!’” sings Katz, a line of which the band said on Twitter, “I was a little self-conscious to use ‘coughing’ as a lyric. But you know what. Many songs will be written about isolation, loss and grief during this time of man, and for good reason. But another big part of this era is coughing.”
A recent press release noted that “Cheekface will release a steady stream of new music through 2021,” so there must be more where “We Need a Bigger Dumpster” came from. In the meantime, make sure Emphatically No. didn’t pass you by—we hailed the album as one of January’s best, with Zach Schonfeld praising the band’s ability to “channel the sheer pointlessness of the modern world into garbled absurdism.”
Watch the “We Need a Bigger Dumpster” lyric video (created by Lenore Melo) below.
