Star 99 are a punk band who make writing a great pop song look easy. If most West Coast pop-punk can be traced back to Jawbreaker, the San Jose quintet have inherited their knack for knowing which moments call for a sugary refrain and which call for a tortured shred. The band’s self-deprecating charm recalls both the early-career highlights of MTV-to-Warped Tour giants like Green Day and Weezer and 2010s Bandcamp cult favorites like the Sidekicks and Swearin’, recontextualized to encapsulate Gen-Z dead-end malaise. There’s a scrappiness and spontaneity to Star 99’s sound—as if you’d just happened to walk by one of their open-garage-door jam sessions. Masters of keeping their frenetic power-pop short and sweet (though not for lack of good ideas), Star 99 dare to ask, “What if the best part of the song was all of it?”
On opener “Kill,” Saoirse Alesandro doesn’t set the scene so much as she shoves you in like it’s the neighborhood pool: “Sun’s out/The campus is locked/We’re like cicadas/Our skin peeling off/All starved and screeching/Last 13 years down the drain.” Alesandro’s songwriting is grounded in storytelling and image, channeling post-adolescent frustration into snarky quips (“You’re a hometown beauty now that everyone’s gone”) and resigned disappointment (“Steam from hot rice and essays for college/Not enough money so I’ll stay in town”). Throughout Gaman, she shares songwriting and vocal duties with Thomas Calvo, who favors wandering vignettes and fragmented confessionalism. The two find common ground in their penchant for bottling nervous energy into compact, combustible hooks and setting them off with no time to spare.
On “IWLYG,” Calvo’s vocal melodies soar over buzzing guitars and sun-drenched cymbals to eulogize a relationship that’s worn out its welcome. “You’re a see-through person, you are invisible to me,” he sighs. “Gray Wall” is its thematic inverse, as Calvo and Alesandro trade musings about words left unsaid over a drum machine that sounds like it could be a sample from “Tom’s Diner.” It’s an outlier, but it works as a mid-album breather, and a reminder that while Star 99 can write a straightforward guitar record, they’re not afraid to deviate from genre conventions.
The title Gaman is a Japanese word for a Zen Buddhist concept that roughly translates to “enduring the unbearable with patience or dignity.” Before closing on a reprise of the opening track’s refrain, Alesandro admits, “They won’t build statues of me/My life will not be biographied/But I love you so much/And I am so lucky.” It’s a full-circle celebration of small victories, knowing that sooner or later the record will flip and she’ll be back at the bottom of the hill. Sometimes, Alesandro’s songwriting recalls another Northern Californian coming-of-age story about feeling both loved and suffocated by one’s home: that of Saoirse Ronan’s character in Lady Bird. In Lady Bird’s descriptions of Sacramento, a nun named Sister Joan reads more love than Lady Bird intended. “I guess I pay attention,” Lady Bird admits, to which Sister Joan replies, “Don’t you think they are the same thing, love and attention?” Star 99 are outgrowing their hometown while still stuck there, paying it close—one might even say loving—attention.
