Review: The Drums - Brutalism

The latest album from the Drums—now just frontman Jonny Pierce—is his most honest and most unvarnished.

o hear frontman Jonny Pierce tell it, his fifth album as the DrumsBrutalism, is his most honest effort yet. Something is indeed new and different on Brutalism, but it isn’t Pierce’s obsessive self-examination, nor the A-B-A-B-schemed verses, nor even the fact that it’s the first Drums album to use a live drummer, as its beats remain as simple as always and the difference is barely detectable. What’s different here is that Pierce’s best trick—bailing the Drums out of all the above criticisms with undeniable hooks—is practically absent. Pierce has described Brutalism as a brave, necessary shedding of a false persona he felt forced to maintain ever since the Drums suddenly exploded into one of America’s most-hyped bands. Many others will just hear a lowering of the bar for what qualifies as a finished song.

Brutalism marks the second Drums album with Pierce as the sole member. Looking back on the intensity of their first couple years as young Brooklyn upstarts—from a ridiculous and irrefutably infectious debut single, to becoming one of the most Shazam’d artists of that year, to the subsequent and mysteriously contentious departure of their lead guitarist—it’s a small miracle that we have a Drums album to talk about at all in 2019, and maybe to no one more than Pierce: “I like the idea of putting out a few strong albums then going away forever,” he said in 2011. But Brutalism is a Drums album by technicality, as Pierce is now settled into a familiar path for 21st-century indie-pop bands, one taken somewhat recently by The Shins’ James MercerClap Your Hands Say Yeah’s Alec Ounsworth, and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s Kip Berman: trudging forth with sole custody of a defunct band’s name. Everyone in this club has since produced mixed results, and Brutalism doesn’t inspire much confidence that the good will outweigh the unnecessary in this phase of the Drums.

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