Review Summary: One step forward, one step back.
I really can’t with 100gecs. My relationship with this band is one of high highs and low lows. I loved them, I hated them, I tolerated them, I ignored them, I appreciated them, I loathed them. Just as their music frequently crashes from one extreme to the other, so did my opinions on them. As of now, I’ve settled on quite liking them and I hope to stay there for the time being, but that’s besides the point. There was a time I thought their debut album ‘1000 gecs’ was an act of revolutionary genius, only for that ecstatic feeling to turn to unbridled hatred a few months later and I promptly wished the hyperpop boom would quickly roll over and die as the sound became tired and gimmicky fast. I got my wish and indeed, the hyperpop explosion that was spearheaded by the album has finally seemed to die out with other major artists who dabbled in the genre like Charli XCX moving on to newer sounds. Some stuck to their guns and kept with it. The genre is still popular enough to continually spawn new underground acts on Bandcamp and Soundcloud, but as for mainstream success, that’s all she wrote baby. And what of the gecs? Where would they go from here? Judging by their dedication to eclecticism, they surely wouldn’t continue beating the same stupid horse right?
Suffice to say they didn’t. Kinda. 10,000gecs is both a mashing of old and new. Old being 4 years ago (and hot damn, 4 years for a 27 minute album is saying something) that is. While there are traces of hyperpop splashed across the record, mainly on closing track ‘mememe’ which teeters between faux-ska chiptune and bass boosted Crazy Frog outtake, the bulk of the record instead leans more and more into overblown pastiches of nu metal and shouty alt-punk. The album opens with the comically weird ‘Dumbest Girl Alive’ which somehow blends the THX boom, Slayer-esque riffs and squelching trap bass ripped straight out of ‘Sicko Mode’. It’s suitably nutty and a great start to the record. After that we slam headfirst into the twee distortion-fest of ‘757’, one of the few songs here that sounds like their first album. With its stereo destroying, overblown bass and messy synth lines, the song could easily sit next to anything on their debut, though the production work is far cleaner. A sign of the duo’s growing skills behind the mixing desk or proof that they’ve made serious bank since the last record? It’s at this point that we reach the album’s first stumbling block, the third single ‘Hollywood Baby’. On the outside, it’s an appropriately mid 2000s sounding piece of pop punk with some electronic elements sprinkled in. On the inside… well, that’s it. That’s what the song is. It’s a pop punk track with some Autotune and electronics chucked on top. Something you’d probably hear whatever flavour of the week band that Big Pop Punk was pushing out at the time with some added salt to spice it up. It’s then that it all kind of hit me.
This is a very safe album.
Now, that’s a pretty broad statement sure but listening to their debut and then this back to back, it’s clear that they’ve definitely bit their tongues so to speak. The DIY throw-***-at-the-wall aspect that made the first album as spontaneous and bizarre as it was is mostly gone here and has been replaced with a more polished, dare I say accessible sound. Don’t get me wrong; there’s still some truly unhinged moments on this album. Special mentions go to the track ‘Billy Knows Jamie’ which somehow manages to go from a Red Hot Chili Peppers pisstake into a ridiculous deathcore breakdown in the span of 2 minutes, but in terms of the out of control, terminally online digital smorgasbord that attracted so many listeners back in 2019, that’s not really present here. With a new record label and a commitment to touring with bands like My Chemical Romance, there’s a sense of maturity around the album, in both a musical sense and a broader one. It’s still definitely wacky, but now you might actually hear these songs on the radio compared to a DJ set done in some crackhead V-Tuber’s basement.
The album trots along with the kitschy ‘Frog on the Floor’ which is somehow the best song here and the dance-punk tinged ‘Doritos and Fritos’, which sounds like it might have been bashed out by ‘Folie Ã* Deux’ era Fall Out Boy if they were all buzzed out on coke. After that; the album kinda ambles about. The aforementioned ‘Billy Knows Jamie’ provides a fittingly explosive midpoint for the album but then things get a bit shaky. ‘One Million Dollars’ is little more than an odd interlude, and not the funny kind of odd like with the last album’s ’I Need Help Immediately’. It’s more just… there, though the ridiculously distorted beats do invoke the trappings of their last record. After that comes the low point, the dreary and uninteresting ‘The Most Wanted Person in the United States’ which sounds more like babby’s first Garageband beat with some goofy sound effects dropped on top of it. There’s a brief reprieve in the form of ‘I Got My Tooth Removed’ which, despite being a fairly tame ska punk song, sports some genuinely great vocals from Dylan Brady in the intro and some pretty intense and powerful singing from Laura Les. After that, the LP ends with ‘mememe’ which I still can’t decide if I dislike it or not.
Well, there’s 10,000 Gecs. The verdict? It’s certainly an album, I can say that much. In a way, it feels like one step forward, one steps back. On one hand, the duo are naturally evolving musically. Sounds do go out of style of course and driving the bloated, decaying corpse of Hyperpop even further into the ground probably wouldn’t have helped things much, so it’s genuinely cool to see the duo exploring more musical ground and incorporating styles like dance-punk, nu metal and pop rock into their sound. But that comes at the cost of them sort of losing their identity in a way. It’s cool to hear those new sounds, but they don’t particularly do much interesting with them. ‘Hollywood Baby’ is a pop punk song. ‘I Got My Tooth Removed’ is a ska-punk song. ‘The Most Wanted Person-‘ is a trap song. Etc, etc, etc. While there are still traces of the style that made them famous on stuff like ‘mememe’ and ‘757’, the record sort of hangs in the balance between both ends and doesn’t really know what to do with itself. The songs are mostly fun and obviously have a lot of passion and care put into them, but they also feel pushed out. And for an album that took 4 years to make, numerous delays and apparently SIX THOUSAND DEMOS, the end result of a 27 minute album with a decidedly unsure tone can’t help but seem a bit disappointing. And that’s the key word here: Unsure. Does it want to be a natural progression of their sound? A mix of old and new? A more slick and corporate affair? A big middle finger to the world? For some, this will be a betrayal. For others, a breath of fresh air: A friend of mine, a diehard gecs supporter and fan, said it best. I told him that I was enjoying the new Gecs album after having been totally split on what to feel about Laura and Dylan’s music. He laughed and said ‘oh yeah, they’ve totally sold out. I think it sucks’. One step forward, one step back.
