Maybe it’s Saturn, maybe it’s synaptic pruning: Either way, things start to get really weird in your late 20s. Slowly, you struggle to remember the names of landmarks from your childhood; you begin to lose patience with drifting aimlessly through life. Suddenly, you realize it’s been a decade since high school, and yet you still feel as emotional as a teenager. As Carmen Perry sings in a quiet falsetto halfway through The Refrigerator, “I’m 28 years old, but I’m still scared like a little kid.”
The Refrigerator, the first album in five years from Philadelphia’s Remember Sports, is a “Saturn return record,” according to Perry—a record about undergoing transformation, leaving adolescence, and tentatively entering adulthood. If the band’s homespun and deliriously catchy 2014 compilation record Sunchokes captured the kinetic energy of a sweaty college party, The Refrigerator is the sound of a 10-year reunion, subdued and sentimental, reflective and a little restless.
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There are still hints of Remember Sports’ punk origins on The Refrigerator, recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studios just after his death in 2024. Their basement show bonafides are all over the breakneck rhythms of “Thumb” and “Bug,” the squealing feedback of “Yowie,” and the sparse riff that guides “Soothe/Seethe.” But more frequently than on previous records, the band—Perry, plus Julian Powell on drums, Catherine Dwyer on bass, and Jack Washburn on guitar—expands into softer palettes and slower tempos.
With a slight caterwaul and a gravely low range, Perry sounds self-assured in these more patient modes, channeling Americana on “Across the Line” and “Selfish.” Guitars laced with hazy chorus and reverb conjure the breezy pop country of Sheryl Crow and The Chicks. These shifts towards a more experimental sound are reminiscent of Perry’s solo record from last year, Eyes Like a Mirror, where they accented lyrics about romantic abandonment with sounds of a car engine revving, as if to cartoonishly underscore their loneliness.
Here, Perry’s calm, unadorned voice cuts through the dense layer of bagpipes on “Ghost” and a wall of strings on “Roadkill.” The band’s slower pacing also allows for melodies to linger and grow, finding strength over time. “Zucchini” grows from a minimal bass and drum groove to a spit-shined power pop gem, layering vocal harmonies beneath Perry’s soaring voice, landing somewhere between “Buddy Holly” and Brill Building.
Perry’s lyrics split the difference between contemporary and well-worn depictions of romance. The album gestures at the passage of time: Summers on the beach are rendered via the way a “seltzer can out in the sand made the day go by so slow,” and we know it’s fall because Perry’s “got glasses on and the temperature’s come down.” But the lyrics are strongest when they walk a thin balancing act between the timely pressures of modern love and an eternal sense of yearning. “Nevermind,” which contains the most sprawling and sunsoaked riffs on the record, opens with a lamentation about hitting “send” on a text message, before unspooling into the line, “I love the way you say my name.” It’s part Frances Quinlan, part Lucinda Willliams, avoiding clichés by undercutting them with the mundane.
