Earlier this year, Cheekface “broke containment,” as the youths say. The Los Angeles trio had spent seven years self-releasing albums of quirked-up indie rock and amassing a following of “Cheek freaks,” loyal fans who revere their playful hooks and meme-poisoned humor. But in March, after revealing that they had rejected an opportunity to appear in an AT&T commercial due to the company’s contracts with ICE, Cheekface drew a surge of attention for their politics—which, like their lyrics, lean lefty and anti-corporate. Then a clip of their jittery deep cut “I Feel So Weird!” blew up and became a TikTok trend in the furries community, and suddenly this humble DIY band was the subject of “discourse” and “quote dunks” and Needle Drop videos and other cursed things that are hard to explain to your offline friends. Some people seemed perturbed to discover that Cheekface sound like, well, Cheekface.
On one hand, participating in online discourse about Cheekface—a band that makes an art out of slicing and dicing internet-speak detritus into free-associative lyrics—is like chasing a dog with a sock in its mouth: You’re only playing into their game. On the other hand, I get it: Listeners who learned about Cheekface via their anti-AT&T stance may have expected a stridently “political band” in the mold of, say, IDLES or Bob Vylan. Instead, they got a dork-rock trio with a cultish following, a comedic spirit, and a frontman who’s liable to start a song about crippling anxiety by dryly intoning, “I’m at the Jamba Juice/I’m at the therapist/I’m at the combination Jamba Juice and therapist.”
No score yet, be the first to add.
Make no mistake, Cheekface are a political band, and especially so on Podium, the group’s sixth album, one that frontman Greg Katz describes as “a Trump 2-era indie rock record” that “grapples with what’s happening in our sick world.” But Cheekface’s songwriting doesn’t have much in common with the righteous-minded protest acts of the Trump era. They are not applying to be an Important Band or trying to impress Tom Morello. These anti-fascist singalongs slot into a more playful and irreverent tradition, one more in line with the snotty pop-punk and ska bands who railed against GOP war-mongering in the early 2000s. It’s easy to imagine coming across the paranoid banger “Black Site,” which satirizes the use of music as a CIA torture tool (“When they lock me in a black site, here’s the music to put on!”), on a Rock Against Bush compilation.
On Podium, Cheekface dial up both the hooks and the sociopolitical dread, but absurdist humor remains their defense mechanism for a world spiraling out of control. Even the album’s most hard-edged protest rocker, the muscular, sax-addled “Discrete,” puts a perverse kink on its anti-ICE indignation by giving us a pitch-shifted narrator who claims to like being manhandled by fascist goons.
It helps that Katz is genuinely funny, filling each album with punchy one-liners and bizarre non-sequiturs. Self-deprecation comes naturally to him: “I boycotted everything!” he bemoans on “Black Site,” but “nothing got better/It only got worse/And now I don’t know where to buy soap!” He also has a tendency to take familiar bits of internet slang and flip them on their head. You know how people love to complain about subjects living “rent-free” in their heads? On the snarkily cheerful “Rent Is Down,” Katz reimagines this as a boon for affordability: The cost of groceries may be going up, but, he croons, “the rent is down/In my mind these days.” Judging from this album, a lot of grim topics have taken up residence there.
